Media Criticism, Social Commentary

“This Is A Blog Post”

10 Comments

It is not a blog.

Can’t say it better than Glenn:

Yes, saying “I made a blog” when you mean “I wrote a post” makes you sound like an idiot.

Some apparently don’t mind, though. They’re often the same people who seem congenitally incapable of comprehending the difference between a semi- and full automatic weapon.

10 thoughts on ““This Is A Blog Post””

  1. How long do you think it will be before some bright eyed little squirrel chitters, “We need a word for the website that collects a writer’s blogs.”

    1. LOL. That is funny DJ.

      However, language is what we make it and meanings, through usage, do change. But I agree we should try to hold back the tide on this one.

  2. “Blog” is a contraction of “web log”.

    As I’m sure you all know pilots, captains, divers, and others continue to keep logs (also called logbooks). Typically, “entries” are made in a log or logbook, but it is also common to say that one “enters a log in the logbook”. If one can correctly speak of an entry as a “log”, and if one can also correctly refer to the entire logbook as a “log”, then why can’t “blog” refer to either the entry in the web log or the web log as a whole?

    Also:

    While I do agree that “I wrote a blog” sounds silly, I think that “I wrote a post” sounds silly too. I think it sounds better to say “I posted what I wrote” or “I posted on my blog.” But that’s cumbersome, and I think people are more apt to say “I blogged about [x].”

    1. Agreed on holding back the tide. A blog post (or, maybe, a blog posting) is what sounds most reasonable to me as most equivalent to “an article on a blog.”

      Never heard “entering a log in a logbook.” Logging an entry in the logbook, sure. That’s parallel to “blogging” as a verb, which sounds fine to my ear.

      “I wrote a post” doesn’t sound silly to me. Also, the thing I’m writing now is a “comment,” even though it’s based on the verb “to comment.”

      FYI, the originator of the term web-log (or weblog) is Jorn Barger, who now has moved to Twitter as his preferred “blogging” platform… https://twitter.com/robotwisdom/ 🙂

        1. “Trying to be contrary” is a strategy for thinking harder about things. My initial reaction to your post was to just agree. But simple-minded agreement is a yellow flag — after all, why blog about something that is utterly uncontroversial and uninteresting. So, I thought about the word “blog”, recalled its origin, and then I thought about how people use the word “log”. Presumably, you’d like people to think about what you blog about, but I don’t see any evidence of that here.

      2. See for yourself — you can google any phrase to see examples of its usage:
        http://www.google.com/search?q=%20%22a%20log%20in%20the%20logbook%22

        It would certainly sound silly to say “log a log in the log”, but each of the three meanings are quite common, albeit only when not jammed together into a single sentence.

        Yup, Jorn’s sign “coined the term weblog, never made a dime” was a classic. Too bad about the anti-semitism that (at least at one time) permeated his writings..

  3. Seeing as we’re bitching about language usage for no good reason, I’d like to add:

    When you refer to cucumber slices as “cucumbers”, you sound like an idiot. It’s a mass noun, like rice. You wouldn’t say “rices” would you? Similarly, stop saying “Legos”, it’s LEGO.

  4. I have mixed feelings about the bastigization of the English Language:

    On the one hand, English is the most dynamic language in all of Western Civilization. Perhaps the world. It’s expressive power is colossal. This dynamism is due, in major part, to the ability to accept constant change to the language.

    I read an article a few years ago describing this, and back then, it said that English had over 600,000 words and climbing. Whereas the French, for example, have limited themselves to about 140,000 words in “official” French.

    There are huge advantages to this lingual dynamism.

    However there’s a price to be paid. When the language is so easily changed, you get monstrosities such as:

    “I will take my learnings and do a better job.”

    There was a popular phase in the 80’s. Although today I hear (a lot):

    “I will effort that”.

    or

    “We are efforting that right now.”

    YECH. ICK. GAK.

    And I positively reject:

    “He disrespected me.”

    So to enjoy the dynamism of English, one must accept such unfortunate constructs.

Comments are closed.