in the beginning

The name of the blog... it probably sounds Hawaiian. Close, it’s Ancient Hebrew, from the second verse of the book of Genesis (or “Bereshit”, in Hebrew, which means something like “in the beginning” but come on, that looks too close to what a bear does in the woods for me to take it seriously).

You’ll notice that that link to the Hebrew version transliterates it as “tohu vavohu” – I’m certainly no expert in transcribing Hebrew; I left it as “bohu” because that’s the way I always heard it in Germany, where amazingly this ancient term is still a slang word for “chaos”.

The most well-known English translation, which I’ve used in the blog subtitle, is “without form and void”, but from what I can tell it’s really supposedly something more like “chaos and wasteland”. Some people even think that the term was borrowed from Ancient Egyptian, but for some reason I can’t find a link for that this morning.

Anyway, I picked it because it’s a term that shows what an etymology nerd I am, reminds me of our five years in Munich Munich, and expresses how little confidence I have in the relevance or interest of whatever it is I might post on here. Thanks for reading!

No, really, thank you, gentlemen, you're too kind. Your hearty applause fills me with a large number of powerful emotions.