Rantings and Ramblings? Really?

I think I’ve always known this in the back of my mind, or perhaps in the cockles of my heart, but I never really thought about it until now. “Rantings & Ramblings” is, well, a stupid name for a website. Or more to the point, it is a stupid name for MY website.

I didn’t realize it until Craig over at Shysterball linked to me the other day, and he said, “…Jeff Snider over at Rantings & Ramblings….” My exact thought was what you see in the title of this post.

You see, I don’t really rant all that much. When you look up “rant” in the dictionary, you see words like “wild” and “tirade” and stuff like that. I do occasionally get passionate about things, but I like to think that I generally avoid the incoherence and irrationality that “ranting” implies.

And I really hope I don’t ramble too much, at least not in a bad way. I think rambling can be a beautiful art form (Joe Posnanski’s blog, to which I am a recent convert, is a great example). I also think that when left in the hands of amateurs, rambling is a sign of weak thoughts and/or weak writing skills. Blogs especially lend themselves to this kind of rambling, because hey, no editor! You don’t have to begin with the end in mind; you just start typing, and whatever comes out is your own special artistry. Only excepting that kind of writing, you know, sucks. With very few exceptions, I start writing knowing at least approximately what I want to say; and in those cases where I DON’T know where I’m going, that is a deliberate part of the process, and that lack of a road map becomes my road map. Freaky, eh?

So if I don’t rant much and I rarely ramble, the title “Rantings & Ramblings” ceases to have meaning and is left with just alliteration. Don’t get me wrong — I LOVE alliteration. But if I’m going to give my personal website a name based only on alliteration, I can surely come up with something more creative and less juvenile than “Rantings & Ramblings,” no? It just sounds so faux-edgy and pretentious, like something Lewis Black would come up with.

So with that said, I am officially announcing that I will be changing the name of my site as soon as I think of a better one. I don’t know if it will be something boring based on my name (which, you’ll notice, is also the domain name), or if it will be something that creatively describes me. Heck, it might even be alliterative. But whatever it is, it will be, at a minimum, accurate.

If you have any ideas, feel free to throw them in the comments.