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ceci n'est pas une 'blog'

There is a growing trend, I find, of individuals making a basic error in terminology when discussing blogs. "I just read your last blog," they say or write. "That blog was dumb." Whut? Now to me, blog is short for weblog (web log) and thus is analogous to a journal in which we write individual entries, or, as I prefer given my earlier days on an internet message board, 'posts'. You wouldn't call a journal entry a journal, so why confuse the issue with blogs?

You may say that I'm supposed to be a descriptivist, so what am I doing complaining about this popular usage?! Well, yes. So if that's what it's going to be, go ahead with it... just be aware that it sounds really dumb.* At least, if you call each little piece we write a blog, you're going to need a new term to describe the whole collection of them. I look forward to hearing it!

*This only applies to the young folks; people over a certain age are exempt from sounding dumb when it comes to matters of the internet. Standards are different, you understand.

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