I took the opening to be the definition:
This is the flip side of finding out you've got a god (or God) hanging around incognito. This is when you find out that that slightly strange fellow who's been loitering nearby is... the other one."That is, a devil who is present, incognito. The text does not say so explicitly but I assumed that the paragraph on false names indicated they usually had one — but it wasn't part of the definition. Presumably the alternative is not to give a name at all: the jig is up if you admit you are a "Mr Satan."
Given your tighter definition, could you give some examples that do not fit? Reading through them, most of them seem to have false names anyway. (I would consider a name like "Nick" to be a false name: I would assume that really thin disguises are false names in this context.)
edited 25th Oct '10 4:09:49 AM by Camacan
I was under the impression this trope was along the lines of "Dracula always goes by Alucard because backwards naming is so not transparent". "Satan goes by Lou Cypher because nobody will ever say that out loud and read it as Lucifer". Is this meant to be our trope for "The devil appears" instead, a parallel to Our Vampires Are Different?
edited 25th Oct '10 4:15:17 AM by Yamikuronue
BTW, I'm a chick.
I think it is a sister trope to God Was My Copilot. (Alucard seems to be sorted into Sdrawkcab Name, BTW.)
edited 25th Oct '10 6:03:57 AM by Camacan
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Louis Cypher is meant to be about characters who are the Devil, who use a name based on that fact. However, a lot of the examples are simply about a character who happens to be Satan in disguise, without a funny name.
I'm bringing it up here because otherwise it would look like I'd just arbitrarily removed about 60% of the examples from throughout the trope. It's possible that the trope either needs to be rewritten to focus on the name aspect, with a link to a different trope based on a character who happens to be Satan in disguise.