A new face for an old name.

I assume that everyone does this, but maybe I'm wrong, so let me know:

Whenever I hear a name of a person that I've not yet met or seen, my mind categorizes them into a cubbyhole in my brain with a picture of the first person that I ever knew with that name stamped on it. When I hear of a "Jennifer," I think of an attractive young woman with long straight dark hair that looks like my first cousin Jennifer. When I hear of a Howard, I think of a broad-faced English fellow that I went to junior high school with. "Sean" is a wild-eyed blonde kid who was my best friend when I was 5. "Edward" is a skinny black kid I hung out with in the summers as a kid.

Sure, I have to translate them to adults, but you get it, right?

Well, I've never actually known an Earl. So I've pretty much just either put a heavy-set stereotypical heavyset Bubba figure into the picture slot, or Tom Petty (who tells us that's his middle name.).

My mother, shortly after she fired up her blog, called me and asked how to plug in an Earl. I asked her what she meant. Actually, I said, "Huh?!?"

"You know. That long computor code, showing where you find a file on a computer or on on the Internet," she said*, frustrated with me.

It dawned on me, finally. "Ohhhh. You mean the U.R.L. Heh. That's the Uniform Resource Locator," I said, cracking up.

"Yeah. The Earl," she responded, kind of grumpily, now.

So for the last two and a half years, I've been thinking URL whenever I hear the world "Earl."

Now I can see something else: This is Url.





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*I'm paraphrasing, here-- this conversation took awhile to parse out.