what's in a name?

I take great interest in names. It may be weird, but sometimes I look up names I like to see what they mean or where they came from. Sometimes I think it would have been fun to study onomastics (which is the study of personal names, according to Wikipedia. I did just look that up. I'm not that much of a nerd.) However, I'm pretty sure that career choice would have required learning multiple languages which sounds rather daunting to me. Beyond the meaning, I also find it intriguing to hear how exactly people or things got their names. Maybe I'm so interested because my own name has a lot of personal meaning. In case anyone is wondering, here's how I got mine. Nina was my paternal grandmother's name and I greatly appreciate the fact that practically no one else has it. It comes from the same Hebrew root, meaning "grace," as my mother's name, Ann, so has connections to both sides of my family. My middle name, Corine, is from from my mother's side of the family and I'm the fifth generation to have that name. I guess that makes me almost as cool as someone with Roman numerals in his name ;) I find funny to think I was almost named Laura Elizabeth, two other family names that are just slightly more common.

Anyway, when it came time to name this blog, I felt quite the pressure to think of a good title. I wanted something with meaning that was clever but not cheesy. I went with "by the way" because it was a bit of a double entendre. There's the colloquial phrase "by the way" that I usually use to preface a conversational addendum, as a precursor to some other sporadic thought, or just to signal an abrupt subject change. This would be the saying that is often abbreviated BTW, or bee-tee-dubs if you prefer to defeat the purpose of an abbreviation entirely, which I may or may not be guilty of.. This expression was a good way to illustrate the variety of topics I may potentially blog about in the future.

In a more literal sense, I understand "by the way" as any number of people, places, ideas, or other things one may see, encounter, or otherwise experience on a journey. Like I said in my prior post, this blog is meant to capture bits of my life to share with others, focusing more on the journey than the destination. Not sure where the path leads, but hope you enjoy whatever I find by the way.