Hello

I had the damnedest time trying to find a half-decent name that wasn't already taken. After trying a few times to register a name, I wised up and started typing "[whatever].blogspot.com" into the address bar. My FameTracker username, pyramus: gone. (And he doesn't even use it!) Every imaginable variation thereof: taken. Words that grabbed me from iTunes: no dice. ("Contrapunctus"--so lovely, so taken.) Appealing French, German, and Italian words that popped into my head: snapped up, except such dubiosities as "brennbar" (useful on canisters of oxygen, not so great for a username).

"Cephalogenic" is a made-up word meaning "produced by the head". Something I thought up, in other words; how meta. It strikes me as odd, though, that the suffix "-genic" has two rather different, almost opposite meanings, "causing" and "caused by". "Iatrogenic": caused by a doctor. "Carcinogenic": causing cancer. And then of course there's "photogenic", which perversely has three meanings--"creating light" (photogenic bacteria), "caused by light" (photogenic epilepsy), and, I suppose, "flattered by light", or "having a beauty created by light" (photogenic actors). Oh, how I love the English language.

This blog is meant to assuage my sense of loss; the Fametracker forum "English Language Usage" vanishes on or about March 15th, along with all the other forums, and if I don't have a place to talk about English grammar (and whatever else leaks out of my skull) I'll go nuts.