Thursday, September 14, 2006
Ceci n'est pas une blog
This thing filling your browser window? A blog. These few lines here? A blog entry. I'm seeing a disturbing number of references to the "latest blog" of somebody who has but one Web log.
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9 comments:
Thank you for saying what we've all been thinking.
I'm afraid a healthy portion of the blame for the confusion re: blog vs. blog post can be heaped upon MySpace.
"Post new blog" is the button MySpace users press to begin a new blog entry.
Well, at least there are only 91 million "friends" pushing that button...
Comme ca:
1. I was imitating Magritte's capitalization.
2. I was too lazy to figure out what gets lowercased in French.
I think your style choice is a good one, but I think I understand where the offending usage comes from. "Blog" is both noun and verb: Bloggers blog on their blogs.
The last time I went out for a ramble, I took "a walk"; the last book I perused was a good "read". I don't think it's much of a stretch to refer to the latest emission of a blogger as "a blog".
Again, yours is a reasonable, probably preferable, style choice. But for reasons of reducing ambiguity, not ensuring correctness.
What I'm referring to is more like using the noun "walk" to refer to both an entire stroll and each step in that stroll. Blog can be both a noun and a verb, but it can't be a noun for both a Web journal and each entry in that journal.
Well, clearly it can be a noun with an overloaded definition; I'm sure I could point to lots of cases in which the word is so used. (Otherwise there'd be little point in your, ummm, blog entry.)
I also think it's a bad usage choice to so overload the definition. As such, I'd make the same call as yours for any style guide that I had influence over.
But bad usage choices (such as refusing to use serial commas, for instance) are not necessarily grammatically or linguistically incorrect usage choices.
Thank you so very much.
Um, OK, so then what do we call a blog? Blo? Bl? B? But you're right: Terms longer than nine letters just don't exist in the language. Not at all.
I'm with you, Bill, on individual entries of a blog not being "blogs" themselves. That usage irritates me; it is confusing.
But I don't call my blog posts "blog entries." I call them "posts." So does Blogger.
Sure -- "post" is fine.
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