I like things with multiple meanings that allude to other famous works. I worked backwards to make that happen for this website’s name. You’ll see what I mean.

A Halting Son (dot net) is referring to me. Like everyone else in the world, the direct reason why I exist is because I am the offspring of my parents. And specifically, since I’m a male, I’m a son. Before any other term — before “friend” or “significant other” or “student” or “employee” or whatever — each of us is either a son or daughter. My friend didn’t create me. My employer didn’t create me. My parents created me. I exist because I am their son.

The “halting” part refers in part to my frequency with updating this website. I mean, I actually bought the domain name back in 2013, finally put a single-page of content up in 2014, and only now in November 2017 have I installed WordPress architecture and told myself that I will definitely be putting things on here more frequently.

“Halting” is also a pretty good descriptor for my life on the whole. I mean, I guess this applies to nearly everyone — few things are truly consistent — but that doesn’t make it less appropriate. I often feel anxiety and doubt about issues minuscule, cosmic, and anything in-between. I start a bunch of projects and barely finish any of them.

As fitting as all of the above is, just luck that it fits so well. I didn’t specifically think of those words and decide to put them in that order. As with many things in our language, it’s all thanks to Shakespeare. Take the dot away and you get A Halting Sonnet, which is a phrase from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing — specifically in Act V, Scene IV.

From the beginning, I wanted the website’s name to have a double meaning that was derived from the domain anchor — dot-com, dot-org, or in my case, dot-net. I know there are tons of other domain anchors out there, but I wanted one of the common ones. Dot-com refers to “commercial,” and my primary purpose here isn’t to sell you something, so that’s out. And I’m not a dot-organization, so that’s gone too, leaving me with dot-net.

With all of the English words and phrases available to me, how could I narrow it down? I decided to limit myself to Shakespeare’s works. The bard was prolific enough that he would still give me plenty of material to sort through, but now it would be limited to fairly beautiful and/or clever language. Well, usually.

I went onto Open Source Shakespeare and just searched “net” to find all of the instances in his plays and sonnets where that syllable showed up, both as a whole word, and as the ending of another word. But none of the phrases with just the word “net” really appealed to me, and words that ended in net (like bonnet or planet) didn’t split well — there’s little meaning in “bon” or “pla”.

Then I came across “a halting sonnet” and everything fell into place. “Sonnet” splits into son.net, giving me “son,” which not only fits, but fits extremely well.

It’s kinda meta that the word I chose from this master of sonnets was, in fact, “sonnet.”

That phrase, delivered by Claudio, is followed by “of his own pure brain,” which is why that line appears with the copyright notice at the bottom of each page.

If you’ve read the play, you know that the person Claudio is referring to is Benedick, regarding his love of the character Beatrice. Well, sorry to dash your hopes of a personal story here, but this website isn’t a love letter to anyone in particular.

Just the whole world.