One evening in 1993 I was sitting in an office in Austria writing my Master's thesis, together with a young man named Caleb. He was interested in me, but I had no idea. Late that evening he went to fix some coffee. When he returned I looked up at him from the screen. He said to me, "You look like a Truenchen!". "A WHAT?", I asked: Truenchen was not a German word. He cringed. "Well, you know, a Truenchen".

"What?" -- He cringed some more. When I had looked up he thought I looked like a Truthahn (a turkey), and started to say that. Two letters into it he determined turkey to be a sub-optimal name choice for his secret love. But what to say? He used the next word that came to mind: Huehnchen (chicken). Still not flattery, but better. Truenchen was the result of his mishap -- and it was what he called me from that day on.

A few months later he helped me move west, 6000 miles. Americans asked: "What do you call her?", and he told them. "Too hard to pronounce", they said, demanding something easy. "True", he said. "I call her True".