usernames

You somehow thought that while I was aware of the existence of a fairly obscure English word, I hadn't noticed it's also a popular name?

I chose the username purposefully. The account which it corresponded to was not of great importance to me (I had other accounts with which to get real work done), so its value as a lesson and example more than compensated for the trouble it caused.

The argument that "it wouldn't be short-sighted to assume that it was a person's name" mistakes the problem. It /would/ be short-sighted to assume that blindly addressing email to "ruth" in an organisation of several thousand people will have any particular effect at all, still less that it will ensure your confidential missive is received by whichever person named "Ruth" you happened to be thinking of when composing it. It would also be short-sighted to create a system which "helpfully" redirects email sent to, say, "Ruth.Smith@University" to a user named ruth on the basis that the email address didn't match anything and maybe this "ruth" account will know what to do with it. It would be even more short-sighted to invent a system which attempts to match named employees to accounts based on the similarity of the username when a perfectly good system for exactly matching corresponding accounts by payroll number already exists. And still more short sighted to write software which treats the human readable part of an email addresss (e.g. the Ruth in "Ruth Stevens" <stevensr@University>) as a username to which the mail should be delivered. And yet all this short-sightedness and more happened.

Slight correction: it's common among English-speaking peoples, but the name apparently is Semitic.