What's in a name?

What's in a name?  A lot more than you think.

The first step in creating a blog is to name it. For context, you need to know that I am a wordsmith. I've been writing since I learned that stringing words together was as much fun as playing dress-up. Not to belabor the point, but as a child I spent no small amount of time thinking of titles for soap operas and smut-novels, but I couldn't name this blog.

There is point, and I'm coming to it. Words matter, and I don't like any of the words our culture uses to denote persons who are no longer middle age. Shall we consider some of the more common ones?

OLD  I like it. Short, to the point, and easy to spell. The problem is that in our "youth obsessed culture" as the media likes to call it, old has about as much appeal as stewed Spam.

ELDERLY  Elder has a certain gravitas. Elderly however conjures up the mental odor of the inside of my grandmother's purse.

AGED  Betcha didn't know this. Webster's definition: To become or cause to become mature or mellow. Who could improve on that? The problem is that most people don't spend their free time reading definitions. If I asked 100 random strangers what the definition of aged is, 98 of them will say old.

You see the problem.

My decision was to name the blog Aging (connoting forward movement) and Divorced ( a marital status). It was the best I could do with what I had to work with.

(At ten years old I had better smut-novel titles than this blog does.)