05.27.08
Doesn’t the word “blog” bring to mind regurgitation?
This is a thought I’ve expounded upon before, but I must address it here, in an early installment of the nascent Everything You Know About English Is Wrong web-log:
Technically, I suppose you could call this a “blog.” You could. I won’t. As a word person, I look skeptically at the word blog. Which is a polite way to say I despise it.
Certainly, I honor the word mechanism that created it, as I do all mechanisms of English neology. It’s an interesting specimen of word-creation, too—an abbreviation that shortens the original phrase (”web-log”) from the front, while most abbreviations lop off the end (such as info for information). Variations occur, of course, such as flu from influenza—lopping off both middle and end.
The mechanism is sound. The result is grating. Blog has all the beauty of other words that start with the same B-L consonant combination, words that have remarkable affinity to the word blog: blather, blab, blabber, blah, blase, blob and bloney. Well, just kidding about that last one.
So, this is not a blog. It’s just blah blathering blabber.
Navel-Gazing Side Note Alert: To be slightly more succinct, I could have tightened my first sentence by writing “expounded on” as opposed to “expounded upon.” But concision is a matter of mental length as well as physical length. “Expounded on” sounds almost unnatural, in that a word as pompous as expounded nearly cries out to be followed by something equally pompous. The phrase is shorter, but mentally longer. And that’s today’s Write Tight moment. End Navel-Gazing Side Note Alert.
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