Fun with Blog Creation

Ria and I really had a great time with Gilbertgirl and Margaret yesterday (two of my Latin students, by the way), helping them set up their blogs and come up with titles. They had their screen names picked out already, but margaret had a blog title in need of a url and gilbertgirl had a url in need of a blog title. Through the use of a Latin dictionary, Henle's grammar, a Thesaurus and an assortment of other books with interesting words (such as Fr. Brown and Grimm's Fairy Tales) we had a major brain-storming session, complete with lots and lots of laughter.

Margaret was up first with a blog title "I Came, I Saw, I Contemplated" ready. The Latin dictionary naturally seemed like a good place to start to come up with a fairly simple url. We tried contemplo and contemplatio, but they were already taken on blogger. Finally the Latin grammar book came out to attempt an appropriate version of one of the verbs. Videam, meaning "that I may see" was quickly proclaimed the winner.

Gilbertgirl was quite a bit trickier. Just to give you an idea of the flow of conversation, she happened to mention when we first got there that she had narrowed down her choice of confirmation saint names to twenty. For a blog title, I think she wanted something flamboyant without being ostentatious, perhaps something felicitious but not too flippant. Well, in any case, she loves to use a lot of big words. :) We started throwing all kinds of crazy words around (mostly from the thesaurus) and were amused by how much we all enjoyed the sound of certain words - paradox, fallacy, querrelous, raze and lots, lots more. We even came up with a few fun blog titles that wouldn't be quite right for her - my personal favorite was "Domestic Paradox". She almost decided on "Chestertonian Propaganda", but when she came back in from sharing that one with her mom (who watching the other kids from both families by the pool), we had a whole bunch of new ideas. Finally, she picked out three and pulled one out of a symbolic hat and ended up pulling out the favorite of the three other schemers, if not her own; Catastrophic Pontifications. To know Gilbertgirl is to know that this fits her to a "T".