Did Ter(r)a change her name?

Many of you have noticed that I’ve begun adding an extra ‘r’ to my name, while others of you have only known me since the time I began this transition. The decision to change (although only unofficially, not legally, at this point) has been a series of events.

First, it is to honour my mother, Terri, who always wanted my name spelled this way but for some reason was not spelled Terra on my birth certificate. Second, and most comically, during my undergrad courses, I learned that Tera, with one ‘r’ means ‘monster’ in Greek. Finally, as I began working overseas, I realized that people outside America had a natural tendency to spell my name Terra, and I found that I quite liked it spelled this way.

You many find it interesting to know the meanings of Tera and Terra. Below are some interesting definitions:

TERA
• is a shielded connector for use with Category 7 twisted-pair data cables
• prefix tera indicates one million million times the quantity (that’s pretty big!)
• a town in the Tillabéri Department of Niger
• the collection, analysis, evaluation and interpretation of geographic information on the natural and man-made features of the terrain

TERRA
• Earth – the meaning we always think of first
• a currency proposed by economist Bernard Lietaer
• a primeval Roman goddess
• a butterfly genus
• a research satellite launched by NASA in 1999

So for those of you who have known me a long time and find it awkward to spell it differently, please continue in the old way.
I’ll still answer to both 🙂