What's In A Name?

Has your name ever made your life more difficult? This seems to be my year for it!

And, on what at first might not seem a related note (but stay tuned), my new book is out! Actually, it's only available for pre-order, if you're enough of a mad risk-taker to spring for a $4.99 ebook before the reviews are in. But it's only a short wait: fully available to read in ebook format, or as a $15.99 paperback on March 28. And if you have Kindle Unlmited it's free. 

More on this (much more, probably) once the book is officially launched and no one is rushing to buy it. But I thought I'd at least mention it now.

 

Check out the link here: Niccolo Would Like a Word on Amazon.

So why has my rather ordinary name caused me grief? And do I have crotchety observations about names in other contexts? Of course I do!

On Being an Outsider

 

This is just a quick post, because we just moved to San Diego, yay! But this means there are a ton of items on our To-Do list. And while it's tempting to quietly shift them to our Let's Pretend We'll Get Right On That list, they are things that actually need to get done. Whereas writing a blog post for a handful of readers with better things to do? That doesn't fit on any sensible list.

Yet somehow here we are.

Anyway, so for a few days my feeds kept adamantly pointing me to an Atlantic article about the upside of not fitting in, explaining all the nifty benefits that come from being an outsider. The underlying article is four years old, so I'm not sure why they were pushing it, other than that they somehow sensed I needed something to blog about.

I actually agreed to the premise, in theory... yet something about it stuck in my craw. I seem to be someone with a very sticky craw, given the number of things that accumulate in there. (Note: I went to double check what a craw was and discovered that all these years I'd had it wrong! It's a pouch in the throat that certain birds use to aid in digestion. I'd somehow always pictured a large Crow clutching something in its Claw.  Crow + Claw = Craw.  It's unsettling to realize one has reached one's sixties with kindergartner's understanding of a common expression for something not sitting quite right).

So what did the article say about the benefits of being an Outsider and what made me grumpy about it?