Brought to you by the letter E

I’ve spent the last few days thinking about what to name this little emporium of thought here on the interweb (and doing little else). In the past, I’ve employed usernames like ‘poofoo_66' (a tribute to former N’Syncer and now-gay love-of-my-life Lance Bass) and ‘chlorineketchup’ (I think this one is obvious).

But now that I’m an adult, as my hot-off-the-laminator South Carolina Driver’s License tells me I am, it’s time to move past these childish pseudonyms and onto something smarter, catchier, or at the very least, more pretentious. As the most obvious way to lend something an air of snobbishness is to say it in another language, I pondered my limited foreign vocabulary.

This didn’t take long.

Well, said I, what else have I got? My name was an easy option, but fear that ‘karenmiller.blogspot.com’ would lead to a stalker experience landing me a story on Dateline and a lifetime of therapy kept me from going that route.

Then I had the brilliant idea of disguising my name in a foreign language, which leads us to today’s topic: Etymology.

I have never been fond of my given name, even if it was once referred to as “a linguistic powerhouse” and described further as “a beacon in a sentence that yells, ‘first off, i'm a noun’ and ‘second, there's no way you can confuse my meaning, which isn't much, except a placemarker that refers to a human being’”. I’ve always known that Karen means ‘pure’ but I began to wonder where it came from, and the same for my middle name. A few minutes on the world wide web and I had my answers:

Karen derives from Katherine. The original Greek form is Aikaterine, which evolved into Katerina. The name then became Catharina in Latin because the Latin-speaking people thought the name derived from the Greek “katharos” or ‘pure’.

Renee is the feminine form of the French Rene, which comes from the Latin ‘renatus’, literally ‘reborn’. Huh.

Anyway, for blog-naming purposes, this newfound knowledge went out the window as soon as I realized that roughly half a percent of the population (the majority of which are Hillsdale grads) can even recognize latin and even fewer Greek. So I went with something even my hillbilly southern brethren could grasp, and here we are at Mow That Dirty Lawn. Yeehaw.