Blogito Ergo Sum

Not that I ever actually read Descartes' exposition on the essence of the human being and the ramifications of being endowed with the capacity to think.

But when faced with the self-inflicted choice to brand my future contributions to what was then not even called the cloud, and to send off daily installments of thoughts distilled down to written language under some kind of catchy tag line -- offerings to the globalized discourse that typically turn out to be less than daily upon dissipation of the an incipient blogger's initial excitement -- I thought Blogito Ergo Sum was not only fitting, but witty.

What with me liking to think of myself as an intellectual or at least aspiring to be one, perhaps one day, though not a public one, not a card-carrying member to the chattering classes or one of the acclaimed talking heads.

Not that one should trust one one's judgment about being funny. You may as well be the only one left laughing at your own miserly jokes.  
 
Anyway, the blog did not get off the ground then, and if you do a Google search now you get about 23,600 results. for "Blogito Ergo Sum". That pales by comparison with the 2-million-plus for the original well-aged locution of the dead white expatriate Frenchman, but it's hardly  an original take on Decartes any more.

So there you have it:  Since this blog will be about law and language, I'll be blawgittng, rather than just blogging, and  will try to make it the essence of some of my idle moments as a homage to the famous philosopher. So that I may still be, rather than not be, - with thought rather than going without. 

Shakespeare no doubt could have provided plenty of raw material for blog branding too, and -- unlike Decartes -- I actually had occasion to study him, and see a number of his plays on stage, but Hamlet and many others have already been cannibalized for phrases, locutions, and sound-bite sized wisdoms for centuries.

When everything ever written, if not said, ends up in the cloud, its hard to be original these days. That's even true of aspiring intellectuals that fancy themselves as capable of innovative thought, those who still get a thrill out of the idea of saying something new; something never said before. Even if they have concluded that trying to be witty may be a lost cause, in light of the stiff competition from other forms of entertainment that are less dependent on the beauty of words and phrases, and the artful concatenation thereof.