Needs Help: Nom De Guerre

Nom de Guerre and Code Name have a lot of overlap, to the point of many examples being on both pages. The "compare to..." lines on the respective pages don't seem to help any with differentiating the two.

Is it insufficiently clear as to which trope applies to which situation, or am I just having a colossal brainfart? [tongue]

(I searched the forums, and other than a Trope Talk thread Code Name vs Character Name Alias there doesn't seem to have been anything brought up on the NDG vs CN issue.)

The difference to me is that Nom de Guerre is about someone being primarily referred to by their Code Name, while Code Name is about code names period.

That's a very fine distinction.

Sounds about right to me. A Code Name is a name given to someone or something for the purposes of operational security, ease of communication in messages that may need to be short and transmitted through unreliable means, or both. This is distinct from a conventional nickname, which isn't really meant to hide anything or aide in possibly-unreliable communication methods, but many of the same tropes apply. (ie, a Code Name may be meaningful, embarassing, ironic, etc.)

A Nom de Guerre is a Code Name that essentially becomes that person's identity. If they go by their code name even when they don't need to — in situations where security isn't a concern, with people who know both their code name and their real name (or at least should, but they may not go by any other name) — then that's a good sign that it's a Nom de Guerre rather than a simple Code Name.

There are also a couple subtropes of Nom de Guerre that are worth mentioning, and possibly worth splitting off into separate tropes. One is Call Sign, a specific type of semi-formal Code Name given specifically to combat pilots (though in fiction, other roles within the military may get them as well), used primarily for the clarity reasons listed above. The other I don't have a snappy name for, but is when people take on a completely new identity as they join the military, effectively declaring themselves a new person and their old selves dead. This used to be Truth in Television for the French Foreign Legion, and is often seen in fiction with an Army of Thieves and Whores.

edited 21st Dec '14 8:45:42 AM by NativeJovian

This trope seems very heavily under used for what it is. Personally I think the name is part of the problem, renaming it would make the differences far more clear and would probably attract use.

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