A to Z Reflections 2024

This was my lucky number eleventh year doing the A to Z Challenge with this blog, and my also lucky number thirteenth year doing it with two blogs. (Why are so many people so superstitiously terrified of 13?) For my seventh year running, I had a fairly simple theme instead of a research-heavy one like I used to. I also waited till March to start researching, writing, and editing my posts on both blogs, a bad habit I know I should never have gotten into.

However, this year’s theme of Jewish names, like the themes of the past two years (Ukrainian and Persian names), was too important and timely to even consider doing anything else. For the fourth year, the themes on my two blogs were linked.

In years prior, I put my posts together many months in advance, sometimes as early as July and August. But over time, I began drifting closer and closer to the deadline, until I developed the procrastinating habit of waiting until the second half of March. That causes so much stress and makes me crash as soon as I’m finished. It takes awhile to recover from that!

Though the themes I’ve been doing here since 2018 seem on the surface simpler than the kinds I used to do, they’re really more stressful and difficult in some ways. I have to go back and forth between multiple lists of names in that language or those categories, keep everything in alphabetical order, credit the source language(s), alternate the order of male and female names without forgetting which one comes first that day, put the names in bold, and give the definition and etymology if known.

Compare that to how themes like mythology, The Divine Comedy, and The Decameron only involved writing about one male and one female name each day, with a simple, singular focus for my research.

I’ve been sitting on just such a planned future theme since 2017, and perhaps next year will finally be the time to do it. The nature of that theme would compel me to research, write, image-gather, edit, and proofread well in advance of March. It’ll stay a secret until then!

The fear of losing the WordPress classic editor at the end of 2024 also makes writing future posts well in advance more urgent.

This year, I featured three categories of names on most days, since modern Hebrew has so many unisex names. That really says a lot about how egalitarian Israeli society is. A few letters (W, X, Q) were extremely difficult to find any names for in any Judaic language, but I didn’t need to do wildcards for them, since some languages did/do use alphabets with those letters.

Last year’s theme of Persian names also featured many unisex names, since they’re also common in that language.

Since this blog is called Onomastics Outside the Box, I tried as much as possible to focus on lesser-known names instead of featuring a lot of familiar Biblical names. Everyone knows names like Sarah, Isaac, David, and Miriam, but most people don’t know names like Bonenfaunt, Kressia, Nuriel, Uram, and Yuvalor!

Post recap:

The As of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Bs of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Cs of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Ds of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Es of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Fs of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Gs of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Hs of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Is of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Js of Judeo–Anglo–Norman, Judeo–Provençal, and Judeo–French names
The Ks of Hebrew and Yiddish names
The Ls of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Ms of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Ns of Hebrew names
The Os of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Ps of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Qs of Judeo–Arabic names
The Rs of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Ses of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Ts of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Us of Hebrew names
The Vs of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Ws of Judeo–Arabic names
The Xes of Judeo–Catalan names
The Ys of Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Judaic names
The Zs of Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and other Judaic names