About The URL

An explanation for cwervo.com

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First of all, if you’re reading this in August 2015 - how exciting! That means my site just launched for the first time, and this is my first blog post! Okay, enough exclamation points (for now), on to the story:

The domain for this website, cwervo.com, comes from a Facebook status I made last month:

V and U used to be the same letter (I’m using uppercase so you can see it without the terminal on in “u”), “V”. Have you ever noticed W is “double u”? That’s because it’s two archaic U shapes (“V”) next to each other: “VV” (double u) ~= “W” (“doubleyoo”). Anyway, the reason I’ve been thinking about this for a while is: my last name is popular around the world and presents problems for getting unique usernames and email addresses and identifiers like that. Phonetically “Cuervo” is similar, if not equivalent to, “Cwervo” and the morphological relationships between the two characters is really cool too, as shown above. ======== BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE ========= “quervo” is phonetically similar (again, if not equivalent) AND a rough morphological derivative of “cuervo”:
c u e r v o (regular)
c| u e r v o (put a descending [I can’t type a descending bar] bar next to “c”)
q u e r v o (squish the bar with the “c” and you have this!)
So. I’ve been thinking about that instead of doing the mountain of homework I have. Anway. I’ll get back to that now.

Aside: If you’re wondering, I did do my homework on time that night. And, yes, I post egregiously lengthy thoughts like that to Facebook a lot. That’s partially why this blog exits! Hopefully this will be a place where I’ll have more room to write without overloading people’s feeds, and a better record of all my late night ideas that never get thought about again.

So, why did I end up picking cwervo over quervo? Well, I guess the simplest reason is that I like the morphology of cwervo more. But there are two other reasons:

1. It’s Closer, Morphologically, To ‘Cuervo’

If you look at the example below, you can see what I meant when I said above that ‘W’ came out of ‘U’. Basically, just take a modern day ‘U’ and bend the middle of it upward, and you have the shape of a ‘W’! While I’m probably the only person who cares about this, it still gives me satisfaction to know that this domain name has this relation to my given name.

2. Easier To Associate With ‘Cuervo’

The second reason I went with cwervo is that it’s more closely related to my given name. ‘Cuervo’ looks more like, and is more lexically related to, ‘cwervo’ than ‘quervo’ is. I think this is interesting because they vary in only one letter, and I can make the case that quervo is morphologically related to cuervo, but ultimately the starting ‘q’ just throws the whole word into a very different place. I’d venture to say some of this is due to the baseline disruption the ‘q’ introduces to the word: all on the same baseline, ‘cuervo’ and ‘cwervo’ simply look and ‘feel’ more related, to me anyway.