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.

I’ve seen the same usage, and I agree with you. Trouble is, we also have the verb “to blog”, which can refer both to keeping a blog (over time) and to posting a particular entry, as in “I blogged about that yesterday.” Nobody wants to say “I posted a blog entry about that yesterday.” I think the ambiguity of the verb is contributing to the confusion over the noun.

People saying ‘an email’ or ‘two emails’ used to bug me that way, but I’ve grown fond of it (like ‘the Google’).  ‘Blog’ is an interesting case of a really ugly word that people ended up loving in spite of or because of its ugliness. I’m trying to use ‘weblog’ for linklogs, and since ‘blogging’ is here to stay I can live with ‘a blog’ for an individual post, but I wouldn’t mind a new word for the collection of blog-posts, that was more like ‘journal’ or ‘diary’.

Well, if Jorn Barger can live with it, who are we to quibble? :->

I also immediately thought of the transformation of “email” from a mass noun to a count noun. That battle was lost long ago.

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