Moonsnail (No, not Sovin)

So, you have to name the blog before you can set it up, which I guess is fair. This is consistent with the English 284 (Short Story Writing) rule that you can't turn in anything called "Untitled," no matter how earnest and dramatic a font you come up with. Decide what its about, and come out and say it. Also, don't write about your dreams. And no robots.

For a blog title, I wanted a phrase that would succinctly encompass the topics of law, rhetoric, celebrity-think, culture, parenting, childbirth, Anita Shreve novels, Marian theology (open to learning here, no thoughts formulated yet) and all these swirling thoughts that might somehow make it here. I considered the Jane Austen quote, "You should have distinguished." But that’s so accusatory. And evokes an unnecessary feeling of poignant regret.

Please note that, if you look online for inspiration, about.com has a blog name generator. I don't know if it's any good because I quit after it suggested "Heart Community" and "White Times." No, not White Times. Maybe I should have kept going, so I could find more things to blog about. In search of other blognameters I found http://www.wordconstructor.com/ which will let you type in a word and use that as inspiration to invent an entirely new word. I typed in “Robin” and it suggested "Sovin," which it rates as "47%." Which I don't get because three out of the five letters are the same, which would make it an even 60%. No, not Sovin.

So, I turned to the idea of a physical or natural image -- something with energy that expands and grows, nonlinear, and not quite predictable, but that eventually organizes into something more than itself. I came upon the word WHORL which seemed perfect:

WHORL: A form that coils or spirals; a curl or swirl: spread the icing in peaks and whorls; An arrangement of three or more leaves or petals radiating from a single node; A single turn or volution of a spiral shell. One of the circular ridges or convolutions of a fingerprint. An ornamental device, as in stonework or weaving, consisting of stylized vine leaves and tendrils. A small flywheel that regulates the speed of a spinning wheel.

I like all those things. Frosting! But I set up the Whorl Blog and realized that “whorl” looks a whole lot like “whore.” Which probably lends itself to all sorts of interesting linguistic and cultural exploration, but I’m not about to name myself that, am I. So I started thinking about the whorling spiral shell, which led me to google around on that idea, which led to Lunatia, the Latin genus for a moon snail.

Moon snails are cool. They are chalky blue on the outside and glossy shades of lavender on the inside. A live moon snail is a huge, gooey mass of mollusk that is four times bigger than its shell. It has a muscle that it uses to drill through the hard shells of clams and oysters. It lays its eggs in these big leathery swaths of sand that are so perfectly circular they look like they were fabricated on a wheel. I remember seeing these egg collars when I was little and having the image that all moonsnails were female -- motherly. But I don't know, maybe there are two sexes or maybe they are hermaphrodites? But then the maternal symbolism things carried itself out this morning, when I looked for moonsnail pictures online and had kept finding ones that looked just like a single, huge breast.

Moon snails are mathematically perfect spirals hiding burrowed into the wet suction of the intertidal sand. They are elegant, messy, delicate, strong, succulent, carnivorous, and life-giving. I think that's a good start.