I got a question from my mother the other day about the title of my blog. My mother is a retired English teacher and she reads my blog on occasion (much to her chagrin as my grasp of the mechanics of language considerably lags hers). Anyway, she is responsible for my love of language (the way a word rolls of the tongue or fits neatly in a phrase). My title is a bit obscure, unless you know me. So, let me explain the content of my blog title.

First off, I consider my time in the Army, Army National Guard and New Mexico Military institute to be one of the defining periods of my life. Duty to others and country etc... The military is rich with tradition, the cadence of life and an exploration of individual definition. Some have heard of the "Long Gray Line" and it refers to long line of cadets that have attended West Point, the United States Military Academy. It means, that there are those that have come before and there those that will come after. Each has a place and there is value in the continuity of duty, honor and country. Clearly I did not attend the USMA, but my school shares many of the same traditions and is called "The West Point of the West". So, to me, The long purple line represents a play on that same spirit of duty and tradition, but with a twist. We have a duty to our folks and we have a tradition of excellence in engineering. There have many before and there will be many after.

I chose the color purple because the logo at one time looked purple to me. I have since been corrected, and was told rather pointedly that the purple color is blue. However, I call things like I seem them, and to me it looked purple. Hence the purple connection to identify myself a true purple warrior.

And finally, a line is something one writes for a magazine or a newspaper. It is also something that one can deliver at a bar to the stunning looking Irish "Sheila" that I married. Never been a particularly good line deliverer but, I played on the line in football (you know, the great unwashed blokes that got their butt kicked in defense of the quarterback) and that kind of appealed to me. I like things with lots of rich content and deep meaning. 

So there you have it. Not a Da Vinci code mystery, but, rich contextual language none the less.