Musing on Musing

I decided I needed a blog in which to share thoughts and arguments and quirky, inconsequential bits of information. I had a hard time coming up with a name but I kept coming back to "musings." It seems so cliché until I read the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of musings. So here is the etymology of musings according to the OED:

[<>muser (12th cent.) prob. <>*mus face (see MUZZLE n.¹). Cf. Old Occitan muzar to gape (12th cent.; Occitan musar), Catalan musar to dream away the time, Italian (arch.) musare to idle, loaf around (13th cent.), to gape, wonder (c1300), (of an animal) to hold the snout up, sniff about (15th cent.), post-classical Latin musare to stare, waste time (1311 in a British source).
The widely divergent sense development in Old French app. has its origin in the description of different facial expressions: the sense ‘to ponder, reflect’ (c1170; cf. senses 1, 2) is perh. orig. descriptive of the contemplative look of a person deep in thought; the sense ‘to waste time, idle, loaf around’ (c1170, but prob. earlier: cf. musart absent-minded, foolish (1086)) is perh. orig. descriptive of a gaping, staring look; likewise the Anglo-Norman sense ‘to gape, stare, wonder, marvel’ (c1180; cf. sense 3); and the spec. sense ‘to play the bagpipe’ (c1120; cf. MUSE n.²) is perh. orig. descriptive of the puffed-up cheeks of the bagpiper.
With sense 4a cf. French regional (chiefly Walloon) muser to murmur, hum, howl. With sense 6 cf. Old Occitan muzar to wait in vain (12th cent.).

So this will be a place to gape and wonder, idle or loaf around, perhaps even sniff about testing the air of discussion or even hot air and it's certainly a place to stare and waste time!