What's in a Name?

It turns out, a lot.

The idea of having my own magazine or newspaper column like Joel Stein's "The Awesome Column" in TIME – that is, one where I'm able to casually speak my mind in the first person for anyone who would care to read about the things I have to say – has always interested me. 

Being a STEM guy, though, I've known for most of my career-conscious life that my future job will most likely be in a related industry, because that's where my aptitudes and interests lie. For me, writing is just one of those hobbies that you like in a casual sense but wouldn't necessarily want to pursue a career in, and as I began to think about how I could satisfy my periodic hankering to write, a blog started to seem more and more like the perfect way to do so: no externally-assigned deadlines, no exhaustingly long story/character planning, no (boring) research, no teacher critiquing my every word, no GPA-massacring grade on the line. I could really just be me. In a way as constructive and helpful to others as possible, that is.

To be completely frank, I originally had the idea to start a blog because I went to a LinkedIn Learning workshop presented by Ryan Zervakos, senior relationship manager and at LinkedIn, who said that LinkedIn is all about "putting yourself out there" professionally, and that sharing content is one of the best ways to do that.

Of course, being a stereotypically annoying eager freshman that doesn't want to seem like an annoying eager freshman to other people, I played it cool by asking him what I should start out with, even though I was already planning out what I would write about, how I would convey my message, the audience I would be targeting, the formatting style, what website would provide the optimal platform for sharing my ideas, and every other little detail I could think of that might be relevant to getting a blog up and running. Then he said "Posting videos is a great way to grab peoples' attention." Well, at least "blog" rhymes with "vlog," I guess. They're even the same word if I try to get one of my Filipino relatives to pronounce them.

But as I searched my LinkedIn feed, tech news, campus event calendars, and random Wikipedia articles for inspiration for my first post, I realized that in the hours I had spent planning out my blog, one of which was spent deciding whether to use Serif or Sans Serif (and you can only imagine how long it took to pick an actual font), I had no idea what I was going to call it. "Insights of a Student"? No... "Insights of a College Human"? Too long... "Insights of the Inexperienced"? I don't want to seem like too much of an idiot... "College Insights"? That has to be taken already... Just "Insights"? Doesn't "insight" imply something useful...?

Coming up with a name was a task I clearly couldn't do without inspiration, so I took to the all-knowing Google to start my blog-naming research odyssey. I got lost in so many blogs talking about how to write and name a blog that I got into that stage where you keep saying a word ("blog") over and over in your head until it doesn't even sound like a word anymore. Blog, blog, blog. Blog? Blog. Or blog? No, definitely blog. Blog, blog, blog...

Blag? I eventually got thinking about my favorite webcomic, xkcd (if you've never heard of it, go read it, it's pretty great), and since I was shooting for a blog style that incorporates the same kind of dry-but-profoundly-true humor, I thought that copying the quirkiness of having the title be "just a word with no phonetic pronunciation," as put by the webcomic's author Randall Munroe, would embody this kind of style as well as it does for xkcd.

However, as I was mashing random keys on my keyboard to see if the Chrome search bar (come on, I didn't want to spend the effort to open Word or Notepad just to type some random text) would spit out some cool phrase with no phonetic pronunciation, I began to think about just how computationally complex the deceivingly simple problem of coming up with such a phrase actually was. I even opened up IDLE and made a short script that spat out random combinations of consonants, but that still didn't help much with all the little nuances of the problem. What exactly should I consider phonetically pronounceable? How many characters long should it be? What should the flow of the phrase be? What is the optimal consonant-vowel ratio? Can I even have a vowel in there? How do I strike a balance between weird enough to remember but not obscure to the point where it really just becomes a jumble of letters?

There are 26ⁿ different combinations for letters of a phrase n characters long, and shaving that down to account for pronounceable letter combinations and reader-interest optimization would involve a lot of research on the statistics for things like the average time spent reading per character in different contexts and the average transient attention span for different demographics. In about 10 seconds of research (on Google, of course), I learned that the average attention span, according to a study by Microsoft Canada, is about 8 seconds. I was just 2 seconds away from claiming to have done research for this blog post and not having any numbers to show for it.

So I completely gave up on the idea of having the title be just a word with no phonetic pronunciation. It wouldn't have been original anyways, and unlike Randall, I don't have a degree in physics or experience working as a roboticist at NASA to make my blog seem cool even if it had a name like "xkcd" that people wouldn't even care about unless they found oddly obscure webcomic titles funny like I do.

Then I got philosophical. The phrase "What's in a Name?" popped in my head, and after contemplating for a split second and deciding that calling my blog "What's in a Name?" would leave the few readers (if any) of this blog with almost no clue what this blog as a whole would be about, in my desperation I asked Google "whats in a name" (with no regard to grammar, of course) and was presented with a quote from Romeo and Juliet.

Now, the first thing I thought was "That's a good quote, maybe if I'd actually read the book instead of using SparkNotes I would've remembered it and had something to write for that one Shakespeare essay back in freshman year." But after that, in my 4 AM delusion, I thought that maybe Juliet was right: it really didn't matter what the title was. I could even call it "Please Give Me a Job, I'm a Desperate College Student With Nothing On My Résumé and Homework Due In Less Than Two Hours!!!" if I wanted to.

I clearly wasn't thinking about the fact that I was taking advice from a fictional 13-year-old who wanted to marry someone they had just met less than 24 hours before. Man, did I dodge a bullet there. Then again, it's still in the post, so net gain of 0?

The end of the story of how I finally came up with the title for this blog is rather anticlimactic. The next day, I thought about how much brainpower I had expended the day before on coming up with something that would inevitably end up being a short phrase, a collection of characters that only has meaning because we as humans assigned meaning to it as a means of communicating meanings of things. I proceeded to think about thinking about things, which caused me to stop thinking about the thing I was supposed to be thinking about, which was thinking about how I could think about coming up with a title for my blog (which still doesn't sound like a word), and then I realized that I was probably totally overthinking things. I had way too many thoughts buzzing around in my mind to focus on coming up with a good title.

How about "Too Many Thoughts"? For one, I definitely was thinking about a lot of things; my mind does tend to wander a lot, as you've probably gathered by now. The title seemed short enough. It has a bit of self-deprecating humor in it, implying that there is something wrong with the amount of stuff that goes on in my head, because there is. This blog definitely is going to have to do with stuff I'm thinking about. And it even has 4 syllables, just like "xkcd." Perfect. The inflection might be wrong, but hey.

So ends the first post, perhaps of many, perhaps of only a few. If you've made it this far, I feel sorry that you've wasted precious time reading something written by some amateur writer who has pretty much no idea what he's talking about. At least you can claim that your attention span for overcomplicated, vaguely esoteric written material is longer than the transient attention span of the average Microsoft Canada study participant. And if I've learned anything from this experience, it's that sometimes overcomplicating things leads to ideas that end up being exactly what you needed for inspiration all along. That is, as long as it takes no more than 8 seconds. ∎

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Too Many Thoughts: What's In a Name?

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