The Lexicographer's Rules

I’ve got very few language peeves, but I’ve been sitting on one of them until I’m ready to burst.

It’s this: the use of “blog” to mean a single entry or post to a blog web site. As in, “Today’s blog is going to be short, but I’ll write a longer blog tomorrow.” Examples are abundant.

See, when I joined this merry blogging trade in 1999, a blog was a web site. The whole site. In fact, it still is. Or at least it’s a cohesive sub-site, like the blogs a newspaper web site will also host for its writers.

The correct choice is either “entry” or “post.” You can have a “blog entry” or “blog post” but you can’t have a “blog blog.”

It bothers me because it adds confusion rather than clarity. When I first came across this usage I really thought that someone was creating a brand-new reverse-date diary-style web site every day.

At some point, there’s going to have to be a disambiguation, in which one of the meanings of “blog” will fall away and the other will continue. Will it mean a whole web site or will it mean a single entry? I’ll check in again in ten years or so. Currently, it’s clearly the newcomers which are using the word this way and they still seem to be in the minority.

The headline Wired Youth Aim to Stir Peers and Sway Poland’s Vote contains three of the most hackneyed words used by lame headline-writers in North America: “aim,” “stir,” and “sway.” All it needs now is “spark” and “controversy” and it’d be a grand champion.

It is well known among those who closely observe the writing style of newspapers that the New York Times uses an apostrophe in acronyms and initialisms that are plural, such as CD’s or DVD’s.

Less well known is that the paper also uses them when writing out plural letters of the alphabet, which leads to this ridiculousness:

In kindergarten in Jersey City, he was scolded for his stubborn insistence on drawing two-tiered lowercase “a” ’s.

That’s a plural “a” in two-tiered lowercase “a” ’s.

It is a slight irony, as it appears in an article about changing the typeface of road signs to improve their readability, The Road to Clarity.

The first problem is putting the apostrophe and the “s” outside the quote marks: two-tiered lowercase “a’s.” would be slightly more readable. It would allow the space to be removed before the apostrophe, which in any case isn’t really doing a very good job at keeping the double closing quote marks and the apostrophe apart.

Having the quote marks at all reduces readability further: two-tiered lowercase a’s. would be still better.

Of course, using a capital “A” would be still more readable, but it’s the lowercase letter “a” that’s being written about.

You can spell out “H” as “aitch” or “haitch” (depending upon your dialect) and you can spell out “M” and “N,” as in “em-dash” and “en-dash,” but unfortunately, the letter “A” isn’t usually spelled out in English, or else there’d be an even better solution, something like two-tiered lowercase ays. You can’t do that, though, because “ay” is a synonym for “aye” (as in, “Aye, aye skipper!") and is pronounced the same way, just as it is in “¡Ay caramba!”

UPDATE: Of course, as “bon bon” at the Buffistas.org discussion board has pointed out, the best way to solve this problem is to take away the plural: He was scolded for his stubborn insistence on drawing a two-tiered lowercase “a.”

It could happen to anybody, but the second summer replacement column for William Safire—which is about getting basic facts like names wrong—gets the writer’s name wrong. It’s right at the bottom—Jaimie Epstein—but wrong at the top—Jaimie Esptein. Maybe it was done purposely?

Lexicographer Robert Barnhart, son of Clarence and brother to David, both also lexicographers, died this week. Robert is best known for the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, three editions of the Barnhart Dictionary of New English, the Barnhart Abbreviations Dictionary, and, with his father, the World Book Dictionary.

Quibbling point: the story linked above calls him a “dictionary author” and says he “wrote” dictionaries. That’s fine, though it’s usually better to say that someone “edited” or “compiled” a dictionary.