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Monday, October 17, 2016

What's in a name?

 A blog by any other name would read as sweet.

Welcome, everyone, to What’s Now? What’s Next? I’ll be sharing news, previews, thoughts, plans, hopes, and all the other maunderings of an associate dean, but I hope you find them keyed to your interests as part of our UGE community.

I was told that the most critical thing about starting a blog was creating the right name. Gary’s Blog was not going to cut it, so I needed to come up with something better. I thought about going all high brow. How does Gaudeamus sound? Let us Rejoice! It comes from a 1287 manuscript in Latin and is the first word in the lyrics to Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture; it tells students to seize the day. Of course, one verse a little later gets a bit risque (I will leave this to your imagination), so perhaps I have not yet found the perfect title.

How about a play on HUGE, our Happenings in UGE newsletter? DelUGE seems too dismal, and Jessica said Kludge rhymed, but definitely gave the wrong impression. Stooge, Scrooge, and subterfuge are just worse, so that’s also a dead end. Maunderings of an old guy is accurate, but unlikely to build an audience. The inside scoop promises more than it can deliver. C’est la Vie sounds cool, but it’s too fatalistic. This is worse than naming your children. Actually, naming your children is easy, because you just accept your spouse’s suggestion. Maybe that is the approach. Consulting with the aforementioned wife and children extracted the following suggestions: Gary’s Garbage, or perhaps Ivy covered professors, in ivy covered halls (apologies to Tom Lehrer). I decided the title needed further work.

But thinking of all those great old Tom Lehrer songs put me in a media mood, and that eventually led me to recall that in TV show The West Wing, the president would always ask, “What’s Next?” I liked it; what is the future? But I needed to add consideration of the present, and What’s Now? What’s Next? was born.

See you at the next installment.

Gary