What's in a Name?

To address the name of the blog -

I wanted to come up with something that included creativity or imagination, as that's the extremely general topic that I'm going to be writing about. My first thought was CreativitINK, but I figured it was taken, and it sound more like someone writing about the types of pens they like to use when they write (an extremely valid topic for posting on this blog, but not what the whole blog's about). I tried a few more things in my head, but nothing jumped out at me.

Then, I hit the interwebs. "Blog Naming" and "How to Start a Blog" were big hits. After a few tries, I ended up on Wordoid.com, which is a name generator which also conveniently tells you if the made-up word it's just created has already been used as a .com or a .net, and how many times it appears in search engines. I popped in "creat" to see what things it would come up with, but after discarding DISCREATY, INCREATED, and SACREAT, among other equally-anti-creativity-sounding words, I went back to playing with words in my head.

Then I thought, CreativiTEA! That's it! I LOVE tea!

Apparently so does everyone else.

Google came back with about 87,000 results for that particular word, reminding me that original ideas are never original, particularly when it comes to homophones.

Tea Talk Teacup by Partea at Wrapables.com

But then I thought, wait, thanks to grad school, I now know the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so I changed the spelling to Creativətea. That upside-down e in the middle? It's called a schwa. It's a phonetic symbol that represents the relaxed vowel sound usually used in unstressed syllables of words - believe, photograph, indescribable - as long as you say the words the way you would in regular conversation, assuming that you are not a person that over-articulates every word in every conversation.

So, the name, so far, includes creativity, linguistics, and tea. Great. However, I'm not writing about creativity in general, or how to be creative with tea, or how to be creative about combining linguistics with tea. I'm writing about my personal journey as a creative person.

I found another blog-naming page on GZZT.com (now THAT'S a unique name), which was mostly unhelpful but led me to chronicles. I like it. It reminds me of the Chronicles of Narnia, which I haven't read (surprisingly, to me, because they're definitely in my genre of choice), but makes me think of books. Oh, and this.

So, there you have it. Creativətea Chronicles. The chronicles of one girl, examining creativity, linguistics, tea, you name it.