@?

REASON ONE:

Way back when, before I knew that blogging existed, I wanted to do something fun online.  Together with my family in the States we came up with an idea to do with emails. We wrote round robin stories. The play went that we would each start a story and then pass it on to the next person in line depending on the decided rotation. The story went to each person once and the final person knew they had to finish it. It really was a bunch of fun. We had a secret name for the group and we each assumed online “signatures”.

• Jill (my mom) was ‘ ! ‘ because it looks like an upside-down lower-case j.
• I was ‘ @ ‘ because of the first letter of my name.
• Emily (my sister) was ‘ # ‘ because the capital E has four straight lines, just like the pound sign.
• Shawn (my sister) was ‘ $ ‘ because of the first letter of her name.

Interestingly enough the order of our symbols on the keyboard are congruent to our age order as well.

That was the first appearance of my association with the at symbol.

REASON TWO:

When I started blogging I had a very hard time coming up with a name / title. Since I didn’t have a themed blog (cooking, teaching, devos, finance, writing, take your pick…) I wanted something memorable and I thought just Angie wasn’t cutting it. Talking it over with my marketer husband he was convinced that my first and last name as an address was very doable but that as a title for a blog it was kinda long and unoriginal. Then I remembered the email stories and I thought that this blog would be mostly stories of my life… bah-dah-bing bah-dah-boom… introducing: @ngie! (the blog).

REASON THREE:

As I began get the itch to get my own domain name and start individualizing my site I thought about dropping the @. It seemed kinda cheesy. To be completely 100% honest I still do think it is cheesy. I am keeping it, though. The founding reasons were NOT the reasons I decided it could stay.

My love for driving is the base for all my design elements. Then I was looking at the @ and it dawned on me why I didn’t have to pitch it in the rubbish. It looks like a steering wheel!

I admit it still has a cheesy flair but it works.

REASON FOUR:

Other people have begun to use it. Some have even begun to write notes and messages to me addressed to the abbreviated from of the simple @. Too cool! That just makes me happy, folks! It’s like the warm, familiar feeling you get when someone calls you by a nickname that you like. It is only a visual nickname, though. How you would pronounce ‘@ngie’ anyway?

REASON FIVE:

I happen to think that the at symbol in my signature looks cool:

Tagged as: blog, Just for fun