Thursday 22 March 2012

What's in a name?

Growing up, I hated my name. A) its nerdy B) its masculine C) Its redneck as all get out. But as I've grown older, I've come to love it more and more.

I was reading an article today about "naming", in the context of the digital age. How things have shifted from the early www. wars for easily recognizable domain names, to now, in the Google era, a demand for names that are unique enough that they will return high up in a Google search, without too much digging (three click rule: after three clicks, a person gets tired of looking. Love the ADD world).

Apply this to my name. When I phrase search myself in Google, I come back  multiple times on the first page, and continue to appear as one of the only females with the same name for several pages thereafter. Apparently, I am unique. I imagine a "Jane Doe" would have a harder time finding herself on a Google search than I would.

Not that being easy to find on the internet is necessarily a good thing, but I'll take the uniqueness of my name as a positive anyway. Sure, my name makes it easy to internet stalk me, but it also makes it easy to remember me. Sure, sometimes I get mistaken for a dude on paper. But what that really translates into is me having more awesomely funny stories to tell.

So I'm done fighting it. This is my name, and I embrace it. Mom, you win.

No comments:

Post a Comment