Our First Million

Our Why Name It That counter of visits clicked over the one million mark at the end of June!  That is an achievement for this little blog.  That came after over a decade and over 500 posts, so sticking to it gets some credit.

My first post was about the origin of this blog. It began as a student project by my then-young son and was something I picked up and converted into a blog a few years later. The idea was to answer the question posed in Romeo and Juliet - "What's in a name?"

It turns out there's a lot in a name, and so I look at why something has the name it does. That led us to find origins for curious names of bands, product names, people names, place names, titles, sports teams and really the origins of any words and phrases that catch my interest.

Early posts were about the name origins of rock bands (a category that remains the most popular posts here). I was working off an alphabetical list of topics at first, so I posted about 38 Special, ABBA, AC/DC and others.

I also started posting about names in sports, including my favorite team, the New York Yankees, and some eponyms found in the world of figure skating.

I started on some place names beginning with Alaska and Alabama but then moving not only through the United States but out into the wider world.

Words and phrases are a big part of the site. The first curiosity was that # symbol known by several names including as the pound sign.

If you're one of our regular visitors, thanks for putting us past 1,000,000. If you're a first time visitor, I hope you'll explore the site via the search bar or by categories or by just scrolling through the latest posts and clicking links.

There is a contact widget on the site if you have questions or want to suggest a name for us to include or have problems with the site. In looking at the older posts, I have discovered how many of the archived posts have broken images and links. We're working on it...

Email Updates Discontinued

This blog used the FollowByEmail widget from Feedburner.
Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement, that the email subscription service will be discontinued in August 2021.
The feed will still continue to work for programs that read it BUT
the emails to subscribers will no longer be supported.
Sorry about that.

Blogging, Statistics and Making a Buck

It is easy to be seduced by statistics. I know several friends who have websites and blogs and are rather obsessed with their web statistics. They are always checking to see how many hits the site gets or what pages or posts are most popular or what search terms are being used to find them. Social media has encouraged this with Likes and Retweets and Reposts. Our smartphones love to send us notifications that someone has engaged with some piece of our content.

For example, I got an alert about this blog:

Your page is trending up

Your page clicks increased by more than 1,000% over the usual daily average of less than 1 click.

https://poetsonline.blogspot.com/2010/12/moving-into-winter-solstice-poems.html

Possible explanations for this trend could be:

• Modifications you did to your page's content.
• Increased interest in a trending topic covered by the page.

Of course, I am happy that people found this post from 2010 and are still reading it and hopefully enjoying it. Google's "possible explanations" for this are both correct, as I did update the page that month and the topic of the Winter Solstice was probably trending across the web as we slipped into winter.

I do glance at my websites' analytics occasionally. I have ten sites and blogs that I do, so it can't be a very regular thing. I do like to look every few months to see what has been happening. I also have a half dozen clients that I do websites for and they are always interested in their stats. But I'm going to write about these origins here whether or not it gets lots of hits. It's not my "job" - though it's nice if someone clicks on an Amazon link that I use and buys a book or something and a few pennies drop into my account.

Speaking of that - I was browsing Amazon to find a book for a friend who wanted to try to start a blog that would make money. I certainly don't have a secret formula for that, but I did find a bunch of people who have written about blogging as a job. The idea of having "passive income" is very appealing - and probably quite difficult to do in any meaningful way. Still, give it a try. If you find the secret formula, let me know - then write the book.

   

Before Why Name It That

I still get a few emails each week complaining about misinformation on the original version of this site. That site was called What's In A Name and it was done as an Internet student project by my son Drew and some friends back in 1998 (Drew was 11 years old).

That site was a finalist in the first ThinkQuest Junior Internet competition for students and it got a fair amount of web traffic. It's still online at http://library.thinkquest.org/4626/  in an archived format - which means we can't edit it. That is annoying, because it has errors, typos and omissions, but they will be there until the ThinkQuest folks (now controlled by Oracle) ecide to take it down. (I was pretty sure that they were allowed to use the content for only 10 years, but...)

Drew and I maintained the site for several months until it was "locked" and then I mirrored the site at another location and redesigned it a bit. This year I decided to move some of the content over to this "blog" format to encourage more frequent updating and the opportunity for reader comment interaction.

So, if you came upon the old site and wanted to complain about something, sorry... no ne is listening at the old site. Contact me here...

Why DID They Name It That?

Why Name It That? has been online for about three months. The intent was to post the origins of names - mostly rock bands, but also products, teams, places and others. A kind of etymology that goes beyond words.

It's not a unique idea. There are plenty of serious etymology books (see below) and websites and ones that focus on places, names and even rock band names. I have a shelf full of them.

The term etymology probably scares off many people, but I think there's a wide interest in why some names get attached to people, places and things. They are fun, trivia, conversation-starters.

I bit later today I'll post my first "request." Someone sent an email asking why something was named that. Now, I'm not looking for requests. I have a backlog of things to post that would keep me busy for years just from the original version of this site that my son did years ago. But the request was an origin that I didn't know, so I did a bit of research.

That's why I'm not big on requests. The Internet makes it so easy to find these things that you shouldn't have to ask someone for the origin. So, the challenge is pick things that you don't know anything about but might like to know.

Any real fan of The Doors knows that the band took its name from two authors that Jim Morrison admired - but why would you name a soda Dr. Pepper?


       

• Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology
• Word Origins And How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone
• The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology
• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford Paperback Reference)
• Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language

About This Site

Today we launch this new site and starting tomorrow, we will begin posting about the stories behind names.

This site began back in 1998 as a site called "WHAT'S IN A NAME" that was a finalist in the first ThinkQuest Junior Internet competition for students.

It was created by my son, Drew Ronkowitz, when he was 11 years old. The students who worked on the site included Ashley Martin-Caruso, Kimberly Kaplan, and Cooper Brooks with some coaching from myself, Ken Ronkowitz, and Jon Hay. (Drew also was a team member the following year of the Endangered New Jersey site team which was the 1999 ThinkQuest USA Gold Award winner.)

In 1998, it was a featured link for the Canadian Netlife magazine and it was a featured "Entertainment" Site that year on Yahoo's Yahooligans web guide for kids.

That original site (which was archived at http://library.thinkquest.org/4626/ ) was described this way:

This site was designed to allow students and teachers to research and develop an interest in word origins - specifically, the origins of names. For example, what some common first names mean and where they came from. Some are fun origins (like sneaker company names), some historical (like the gods & goddesses used to name our days and months) There were MANY categories we did not have time to fully research or create pages for... we hope to add more after the judging. Teachers might use it for history, teaching mythology, etymology of words... students might develop an interest in origins just by browsing areas like our pages on famous people who changed their names.

The first incarnation of the site had sections on the stories behind:

• People's First Names
• Last Names
• Famous Name Changers
• Rock Bands
• Days of the Week
• Sexiest Names
• Sports Words
• Pet Names
• Months of the Year
• Beanie Baby Names )after all it was 1998 & the site owner was 11)
• Product Names
• U.S. State Names
• Millennium Names
• Baby Names
• Names in the News

By far, the most popular page was the one about the names of rock bands. It generated the most hits and the most comments and emails.

Drew and I maintained the site for several months until it was "locked" from updating by the ThinkQuest group.

In 2000, I mirrored the site at another location and redesigned it. I eliminated some categories (such as the Beanie Babies) and focused on the most popular topics (such as bands).

This year I decided to move some of the content to a blog format to encourage more frequent updating and the opportunity for reader comment interaction.

As the months progress, I will reintroduce some other areas of name etymology.

William Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet about names, and that was what inspired the title of the original site.

JULIET: What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. (Romeo and Juliet, Act II scene ii)