Language is the People's: Dispatches from a Grammar Wars foot soldier

The Further Adventures of Hiatus

2009-11-22T22:17:00.003-06:00

It may be some time yet before I get back this. It was fun, but I still don't have a comfortable blogging setup in my new house (my main distraction this past year) and I still haven't found the extra time I'll need in my week in order to start up again properly.

(If you didn't know, I'm an extremely slow blogger.)

I have no tolerance for glacial blogs and no idea when I'll be able to figure this out, so I don't want you waiting on some expected future update. I mean, I definitely didn't get back to you in six months after my last post. Sorry about that, by the way.

When and if I'm blogging here regularly again, I'll also start reading and commenting on my favorite language blogs again, so if you're hip to those that's how you'll know I'm back. See you in the blogrolls, as they say.

In the meantime I've been getting a lot of spam comments lately — the nasty things prey on old, neglected blogs like this one — so I'm going to disable new comments. I apologize for the inconvenience.

This hiatus just got REAL

2009-01-26T22:26:00.003-06:00

I've had a lot of other stuff on my mind lately. Nothing bad. But I haven't had the inclination to update here or to read the several months' worth of language blog posts I've already missed.

I'm not sure when I'll be posting again; it won't be for another couple months at the very least. The Language is the People's RSS feed will not change in the meantime.

I'm just going to let the "language" tab on my own RSS reader lie fallow, so if you subscribe to my language links on delicious, don't expect many additions. And if you run one of the language blogs I've been a fan of in the past, don't expect me to be commenting on your site for a while.

For the time being this hiatus is indefinite, but there'll be another post sometime in the next six months (at the absolute latest) to let you know what the deal is.

Meh declared cromulent

2008-11-24T15:09:00.003-06:00

As you've probably heard, meh is going to be in the Dictionary, which means that it's now officially a real word. Those power-mad lexicographers have screwed us again.

Ben Zimmer has an omnibus post on meh up over at Word Routes, and I don't really have much to add to it. He even caught the miscitation of the 2001 Simpsons episode "Hungry, Hungry Homer" instead of the 1995 episode "Lisa's Wedding."

(Note to Collins Dictionaries: Snpp.com is your friend.)

I did want to point out, however, that Jeffrey Rowland of Overcompensating — no stranger to word rage — has posted a comic about meh. Check it out.

(I especially like how he's wearing a "The" shirt instead of the expected "Teh" shirt — for sale here, explained here. It's prescriptivism with style!)

The usual post-election vocab lesson

2008-11-05T10:10:00.008-06:00

Bart: I am so sick of hearing about Lisa. Just because she's
doing a little better than me—

Marge: She's President of the United States!

Bart: President-*elect*.

Congrats to those of you who supported Obama. It's a giddy time for wonks and English geeks generally: we get to spend the next few months correcting President to the delightfully technical President-elect.

I don't see any U.S. newspapers using it, but there's an additional potential distinction, President-designate. Check out this 1976 entry from The American Political Dictionary:

Following the November popular election, the winning candidate is unofficially called the "President-designate" until the electors are able to ratify the people's choice. Under the Twentieth Amendment, the President-elect is sworn into office at noon on the twentieth day of January, and if the President-elect fails to quality at that time, the Vice President-elect then acts as President.

As Wikipedia points out, if the President-elect dies before being sworn in, then the Vice President–elect becomes President. If, however, the President-designate dies before being voted President-elect on December 15th, then the Electoral College could choose a different President-elect, and they are not required to choose the Vice President–designate.

Obviously the news outlets are just following the common usage of President-elect. For one thing, calling Obama President-designate might come off as the same sort of dog-whistle that mentioning the middle name Hussein is in some circles.

Still, odd that no copy editors have latched onto the December 15th date for "official" President-elect status; it seems like the sort of petty terminological minutia they usually enjoy.

Contest FAIL

2008-09-29T06:44:00.002-05:00

There were no entries, obviously... I'm still curious to see what someone can pull off, punctuation-wise, so I'll try to do this again next year with a bit more notice and perhaps a better incentive.

Meanwhile I proposed the same contest at my work and did get some entries, but they all had either too many periods or too many commas and so were all disqualified. I'm not sure if that's better than nothing...

(Isn't the snowclone [X] FAIL odd? Are nouns really the only "grammatical" inputs for [X]?)

A National Punctuation Day Contest

2008-09-24T09:04:00.006-05:00

Happy National Punctuation Day!

(Dear official website people, I'm not linking to you because I can't even access your website at work. It has streaming media. Sincerely, Dan.)

So I don't know how to celebrate today. I baked a cake, but unfortunately it's not punctuation-themed; I should have invested in a comma cake pan.

Since the cake was a delicious failure, I've decided to offer a No-Prize (and perhaps something else, if the competition is fierce) to whomever can use the most punctuation marks in one properly-punctuated coherent paragraph without reusing any of them.

Punctuation marks that have to occur as a set (e.g. quotation marks) will count as one point total, and the set can still only be used once. There are no points or penalties for using capitalization or spaces or diacriticals, but use more than one period and you're out.

So have at it, if you're so inclined. Leave your submissions in the comments. The deadline is midnight tonight, Central time.

Bonus punctuation-related content: yesterday Dooce posted an amusing exchange of some slight relevance.

Carol: "Who needs best friends when I have you!!!???"

Me: "Carol, that was three exclamation points and three question marks. Someone out there right now is trying to write a paper and can't because you used up all the punctuation."

No one will ever pick up on this hyperbole

2008-09-22T13:29:00.011-05:00

Speaking of signs, remember those guys who were fined for correcting a sign at the Desert View Watchtower in Grand Canyon National Park?

Well, the promised "Statement on the signage of our National Parks and public lands" is up at the old Typo Eradication Advancement League website, and... does anyone else think it's a little snotty?

Sample quotes:

"It is absolutely egotistical for one to think that one can tell others how to spell."

"The act of vandalizing or damaging signs on the National Parks and public lands has a historic and archaeological impact that one cannot underestimate."

"Certain of the signs may have been put into place at the birth of the park, thus representing as intrinsic a part of its identity as any tree or canyon [sic!] within the park."

Moreover, the statement points out twice that "Altering signs without the permission of the owner is a crime!!" Without reading too much into it, I'll just observe that the old TEAL posts that I've seen always only used a single exclamation mark. So this is a little odd.

(I've been offline for a few days, and I see now that friend-of-the-blog Mighty Red Pen already wrote about this a few days ago. She too found TEAL's sudden embrace of orthographic radicalism more than a little surprising.)

A spirited defense of good grammar

2008-09-12T16:12:00.005-05:00

Today is that greatest of Achewood holidays, Fuck You Friday. Check out Mr. Bear in the final panel:

Like many other web cartoonists, Chris Onstad usually adds a comment to the image title field. Today's is "Seriously, like ten people are involved in making signs. How do these things go unnoticed?" In-deed.

Feel like celebrating? Here are the other Fuck You Friday strips:

Fuck You
Fuck You Friday for December 2005
Leo Fontanette (which is the set-up for...)
Leo Fontanette and the Corn Field
Fuck You Friday - Pat Edition
Fuck You Friday September Twenty-First

Good Stuff: 8/29/08

2008-08-29T12:03:00.007-05:00

The Lyceum - Why German Sounds Funny
An excellent explanation.

The Boston Globe - Chillax
Erin McKean on "I know it's not a real world" apologia. This was the inspiration for a rant of mine earlier this month.

NYT - From A to Zyxt
A review of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. (Shea has also been blogging over at OUPblog for a while now.)

Word Wise - Comma Mia, Here I Go Again; My My, How Can I Resist You?
Some good advice for anyone who overuses commas.

Futility Closet - Mind Games
A list of names for interesting states of mind (like déjà vu).

Montreal: phonetics, purists, and even some terrorists

2008-08-27T15:59:00.012-05:00

One of my fellow roadtrippers was friends with a guy from Quebec, so on the second day of our stay in Montreal we met up with him at a local bar, where he taught us the swears (there's a cheatsheet somewhere, but basically Quebec hasn't made the switch from blasphemy to profanity, so tabernac (sp?) is one of the worst things you can say) and answered our other questions about Montreal.

I can't tell you how nice it was to finally find out what those little triangle marks were called: circumflexes. As Fred tells it, to convert French into québécois, you should pronounce every vowel as if it had a circumflex accent.

Who knows if that's correct. Since reading a post on Foreign Place Names over at Linguism, I've been terrified of French phonology:

For instance, of all the forty-odd phonemes of English, and the similar number in French, only two are identical in the two languages (and there may be small differences even here): /f/ and /m/. All the other sounds of the two languages have differences that contribute to the sound of a French accent in English, or an English accent in French.

After drinks (but also before yet more drinks), Fred took us on a walking tour of the city. He paused outside of a Second Cup to show us the tiny type that had made it into a Les cafés Second Cup.

As I understand it, the business name "Second Cup" is permissible under the Charter of the French Language, even if the predominant language on everything inside the building has to be French.

The "Les cafés" was added to some signs in 2000, after the French Self-Defence Brigade (a translation of the official name, I'm sure) attempted to firebomb three franchises in Montreal. And there were protests last year when the chain considered changing the name back to just "Second Cup."

Successful protests, as far as I could tell.

(Check out this post at Fagstein, the blog of a copy editor in Montreal, for a local's take on the Second Cup issue.)

Related: Montreal is also home to a strangely familiar coffeehouse chain called Café Starbucks Coffee.

We may have actually had drinks at McKibbin's, the Irish pub that was cited for decorating its interior with vintage English-only beer ads (my goodness!), but I wasn't paying attention so I can't be sure.

One article on that particular tempest in a teapot had some nice trivia at the end: a list of "other cases over the years that have attracted the interest of the language watchdog or people seeking to protect the French language." Enjoy.

1996: A woman warns the owner of a Quebec pet store she might get in touch with language authorities because Peekaboo, the parrot she wanted to buy, didn't speak French.

1999: The Old Navy chain is asked to rename its stores "La Vieille Rivière." It never happens.

2000: The owner of an Indian restaurant is told he's breaking the law by having coasters for "Double Diamond," a British beer.

2001: Some people express disappointment that race-car driver Jacques Villeneuve calls his restaurant "Newtown."

2005: Language authorities say they will investigate complaints that Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay's party used the word "Go" on its posters and pamphlets, as in "Go Montreal."

2007: Imperial Oil says it will keep its Quebec-only "Marché Express" name for its Esso gas stations after protests against a proposal to change the name to "On the Run," as they are known elsewhere in North America.

2007: About 50 people protest outside a Second Cup outlet to demonstrate against the words "Les cafés" being dropped from "Les cafés Second Cup" at some of the chain's outlets.

2007: Language activists decry that callers to many Quebec government offices are told to "press nine" for English before instructions are delivered in French. Some of the departments have since changed the message to put English at the end.

...And that's all I have to say about Canada at the moment. We now return to your regularly scheduled anti-prescriptivism.

The Apostrophes of Canada

2008-08-21T11:24:00.019-05:00

It seems like these days everyone is talking about the semicolon (it's so hot right now!), but I think John McIntyre summed up the situation nicely:

I wonder at the writers who carp and cavil about the semicolon, finding it unpleasant, artificial or even ugly, when it is the apostrophe that is the source of most of the trouble in English punctuation — inept plurals, bungled possessives, nasty little hooks in the wrong place all over the landscape

It should come as no surprise that Canadians have all the usual issues with the apostrophe, though I have to give them some props for their invention of the Canostrophe.

(original pic here)

These were everywhere as soon as we crossed the border. Here's one on an Arby's sign. I could've sworn that I saw one on a McDonald's somewhere, but the Internet is skeptical.

Fact: in a perfect world the Canostrophe wouldn't be restricted to signage, and MS Word would autocorrect regular apostrophes for users in Canada.

Apostrophes were notably absent on all signage for the ubiquitous Tim Hortons, birthplace of the repeater double-double, a Canadian term for "coffee with two creams and two sugars."

There are theories that the lost punctuation in Tim Hortons has something to do with Quebec's language laws, but then why does this McDonald's in Montreal get to have apostrophes?

(original pic here)

From the moment I saw this McDonald's, the apostrophe placement in that vertical sign really bugged me...

More on Quebec's crazy language laws in a future post.

On being American in Montreal

2008-08-19T20:26:00.002-05:00

A quick post to start, while I collect my thoughts.

On the drive through Quebec, we tried to master a few key phrases with some help from an old high school French textbook. I needed only "What beers do you have?" and "Have you seen four American girls?", but when it turned out that I could only hold two new French words in my head, I settled on "American girls?" — and I can still remember how to say it, but don't ask me to try to spell anything in French for you.

It turns out that it's much easier to get by without French in Montreal than it is in France. Nevertheless, this ode to rudimentary French quickly became our official roadtrip theme song:

Doing my part to fight the word staycation

2008-08-08T15:59:00.008-05:00

I'm going to Wisconsin this weekend, and then I'll be in Montreal all next week. So there won't be any posts until the 18th.

In the meantime, enjoy this soul-crushing Stet of the Week, reproduced with only slight alterations from an actual message board transcript:

Our Bold Hero: On the image for [this product], soffit is spelled incorrectly, as sofit.

Project Coordinator: Checking with client.

Project Coordinator: Correct spelling for Sofit is Sofit. On the items listed below, can you correct Soffit to be Sofit? I've bolded the spots in the long description and name.

Our Bold Hero: Are you sure? Soffit is the spelling for the word meaning "A material which covers the underside of an overhang," according to everything I looked at (newspapers, Wikipedia, and dictionaries).

Apologies in advance if Sofit is some word I've never heard of that means something else...

Project Coordinator: Client wants it spelled w/one ''f'': sofit

I know it's wrong, but...

That's totally a word

2008-08-04T12:02:00.009-05:00

Erin McKean, the Internet's lexicographer-next-door, has a great guest column in Sunday's Boston Globe about what she calls "not a real word" apologia — i.e. caveats like "(if that's a word)" or "(is that a real word? LOL!)."

This has always bothered me. Unless you're actually talking about a string of letters that doesn't signify anything, it makes no sense to claim that something "isn't a word."

Alternatively, if you don't think that a word is "real" until it's appeared in the OED or the Official Scrabble Dictionary or the Google corpus, then I can see the sense of your argument, but I think you should know that you have an unusual definition of real.

(One that you won't find in any dictionary, I might add.)

The notion that a dictionary could be the arbiter of what words are "real" fascinates me. I understand that most people adopt this mindset thoughtlessly, but it would be cool to see some prescriptivism which took it seriously.

I imagine something like this:

Anyways, I found it odd that McKean took such a diplomatic stance, focusing on speakers uncertain of their own words when — as any good Grammar Warrior knows — claims that such-and-such "isn't a word" abound in pop-prescriptivism.

I could find examples elsewhere, but I'm going to pick on the folks at Everything Language and Grammar because they're professionals.

Excerpts:

"Gonna is not a word; it's merely a verbal laziness of going to." [cite]

"I use ain't as an example because we should all know that it's not a word" [cite]

"As I like to say, irregardless is not a word regardless of its presence in the dictionary—period." [cite]

What they're really talking about here is whether a word is acceptable or appropriate or cromulent — not whether or not it's "a word, period." Frankly, this is sloppy writing, because I don't have any idea what "word" means here now. I don't think that they're trying to pretend to authority and rigor that their prescriptivism doesn't have, but I can't be certain.

In contrast, the post on doable strikes just the right tone:

"I'm not saying that this is not a word; however, just because something is a word doesn't mean that it's necessarily the best way to express yourself."

This is aptly put. Anyone is free to make the case against any word as a matter of taste — in fact, we did this just the other day at Editrix — and people might agree with you that this word is ugly because it mixes Latin and Greek or that that word is pointless because we already have a better one for the same thing or that my good friend irregardless is stupid because it has a redundant affix.

However. If you want to actually dismiss certain words as non-words, turn "I don't like that" into "that's wrong" — well, then I want a definition of real word that makes sense. And I want something deontological, so that I can figure out if a word is "real" even when you're not around.

Good Stuff: 7/31/08

2008-07-31T22:23:00.005-05:00

I've been really busy at work lately, so I'll be the first to admit that I didn't pay much attention to Internet language stuff this month. That said, here are two links you might enjoy:

Wikipedia - Walla
"In American radio, film, and television, walla is a sound effect imitating the murmur of a crowd in the background." There's a nice mention of the use of "rabble rabble rabble" on South Park.

Regret the Error - Paper misspells its name on front page
Amazing. This is my nominee for Typo of the Year.

DNC beers and legislative acronyms

2008-07-30T12:42:00.018-05:00

A post today at Beer (& More) In Food pointed me to an interesting roundup of Democratic National Convention beers, including the well-named Obamanator Maibock ("German tradition has it that any beer named with an '-ator' suffix indicates bock extra strength beer") from Wynkoop.

There's also mention of a Political Ale from Rock Bottom. Lame. Personally, I think that would have been better as PoliticAle, in the manner of our local Surly CynicAle.

(Speaking of, I can't find anything on RNC beers for us Minnesotans. Town Hall will probably do something though. And Flat Earth will continue making Black Helicopter, as always. Oh, beer names.)

(The government's strange approach to beer labels is also worth pondering. There are rumors that this somehow explains why there's no Black Helicopter in bottles.)

Related: apparently the Tomnibus has stalled, which is completely fine with those of us who only liked it because it had the best nickname of any legislation ever. (Alternative candidates welcome.)

I've just discovered, however, that the Tomnibus just happened to contain the MOTHERS Act. Let's look at section 1 of the MOTHERS Act:

This Act may be cited as the 'Mom's Opportunity to Access Health, Education, Research, and Support for Postpartum Depression Act' or the 'MOTHERS Act'.

As several political commentators have already noted, there's no consistent rule you can apply that would give you MOTHERS from that name: the most logical acronym would have been MOAHERSPD.

Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum has a post on poorly contrived legislative acronyms. It concludes with this excellent observation:

Still, at least their staffers made a half-assed attempt at a memorably demagogic name. Not so Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), whose REAL ID Act includes a completely bogus "acronym" that does not stand for anything except his desire to trick people into believing he came up with a ridiculously contrived name that generates an evocative acronym. REAL is a fake.

The NYT doesn't all-caps acronyms longer than four letters, so it managed to sidestep the whole MOTHERS issue... but I see that it went with Real ID in numerous articles, when of course the official name is written REAL ID.

A strange case of eschewing accuracy for the sake of... accuracy.

Wundergrammar: A North Carolina rule

2008-07-14T19:21:00.006-05:00

Work has been crazy lately. Here's an extremely odd bit of... let's call it prescriptivism... from a customizable flyer on the internal product creation website of one of our major clients:

I'm guessing that this prescription has more to do with financial and/or legal considerations than with matters grammatical, but I'm still baffled.

Why not lunch? Or dinner, for that matter? Do the good people of North Carolina not deserve a proper meal?

Good Stuff: 6/30/08

2008-06-30T22:12:00.005-05:00

And here's my favorite language-related stuff for June:

Verbivore's Feast: A Banquet of Word & Phrase Origins - Ecdysiast
The origin of ecydsiast, H.L. Mencken's hifalutin alternative to stripper.

Business Writing - Show Me the Manual!
An authority on business writing dismisses unsourced prescriptivism.

(There were some other good anti-prescriptivist posts this month: Bradshaw of the Future called a snob a snob, and at Off the Wall, Bruce Byfield described some typical reactions to his descriptivism. See if you can spot any of those in the comments on that BotF post.)

World Wide Words - Brownie points
Another interesting word history. I like the idea that its tangled etymology helped promulgate this expression.

Nobody's Business - Language Matters
From one of the libertarian blogs I follow comes a usage quibble I haven't encountered before: threat vs. risk. Non-libertarians might not care.

Cryptomundo - The Short History of Blobsquatch
So awesome. Loren Coleman of Cryptomundo traces the origin of blobsquatch, perhaps the best word I've learned this year. Blogsquatching, mentioned in this same post, is a close second.

Nice-nice

2008-06-25T12:45:00.003-05:00

This morning on CNN I heard Dick Uliano say that Hillary and Obama are "making nice-nice after their bitter primary battle."

I love that making nice-nice. I'm a sucker for this sort of reduplication(?) in English, whether it's meant to clarify (as in "he drives a car-car") or — as is presumably the case here — merely there for emphasis (like my friend who says "multiple multiple times").

And then there's that famous Sidney Morgenbesser story:

In the 1950's, the British philosopher J.L. Austin came to Columbia to present a paper about the close analysis of language. He'd just explained that, although two negatives make a positive, nowhere is it the case that two positives make a negative, when from the audience a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, "Yeah, yeah."

(Also humorous but completely unrelated: I just learned that the heart of rock and roll is not Topeka, but rather still beatin'. Mondegreen ho!)

In defense of the humble ecdysiast

2008-06-23T16:32:00.007-05:00

From a defense of Grand Theft Auto IV in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education:

You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car — or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up — and see if you're tempted.

As someone who's finished GTA IV and who loved the game, I'll pause here to note that weapons no longer "hover" in this installment.

Nor do I recognize the mission scenario ("an epic shootout involving missile launchers and strippers") in the essay's lede.

Nor do I remember facing off against any of the "vigilante strippers" that the author alludes to elsewhere.

It would be nice if writers concerned with dispelling myths about GTA IV could refrain from creating their own misinformation; these distortions in particular are especially irritating because they make GTA look cartoonish, which it (mostly) isn't. This game has humor and satire, but it also has drama, verisimilitude, and (fantastic) characterization. It would help if its defenders could take it a bit more seriously.

So. As you may have guessed, I want to talk about the strippers. We all know what strippers are, right?

Certainly you'd expect Bill Blake, who, even if he hasn't played GTA IV, is nevertheless an adult and (this is what's known as the "kicker") a doctoral student in cultural studies, to be aware of this phenomenon.

[...] or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up [...]

Neither in real life nor in the game do strippers hang around on the street, waiting for people to pick them up. To put it simply:

Stripper ≠ prostitute

I don't understand how a copy editor — or any alert reader — could miss this. Say what you will about my dubious morals (or worse, my prescriptivism), but stripper is a fairly basic term, wrongly applied here, and I'm shocked that it made it to publication.

Roughly equal to 50 brownie points

2008-06-04T10:34:00.007-05:00

A friend of mine asked me for a "solid" last night, which I quickly brushed off as a rather small favor, easily done.

This slang sense of solid goes back at least to the '70s. However — perhaps this is just my own personal idiolect, but I'm somewhat surprised to find that almost no definition of solid mentions that it's necessarily a substantial favor.

You could say, "Would you do me a favor and pass the mustard," but you would never call that a solid. At least I wouldn't. It would cheapen the solid.

(Obligatory Simpsons linguistic tie-in: at the end of "Bonfire of the Manatees," Homer says he can take a few days off work because "I've got a friend who owes me a solid." The next scene — wherein a manatee poses as Homer — is priceless.)

Good Stuff: 5/30/08

2008-05-30T08:49:00.005-05:00

Here's my favorite language-related stuff for May:

You Don't Say - Splittists
Some excellent thoughts on the "baseless prohibition against the split infinitive."

OUPblog - The Eternal Fascination of OK
A post on the origin of OK that comes down definitively in support of my favorite theory.

Wishydig - Have red pen. Will travel. (part I)
Apropos of this Typo Eradication Advancement League post, a defense of the "fronted appositive."

Language Hat - PSEUDO-WORD FEAST.
Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame) has already proven that descriptivists make the best prescriptivists — but in case there was any doubt, check out this amusing "public keelhauling" of a sentence from the New Yorker.

Financial Times - One language fits all
In this review of The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, and the inexplicably subtitle-less English Next [PDF], Henry Hitchings considers the future of English.

[sic]

2008-05-28T10:49:00.004-05:00

From a coworker:

Chuck Norris noticed your correct spelling, made an error in it, and dared you to say some shit.

A $25 difference

2008-05-19T14:43:00.003-05:00

The American Heritage Dictionary defines crosswalk as

A path marked off on a street to indicate where pedestrians should cross.

Minnesota statute 169.01.37 defines crosswalk as

(1) that portion of a roadway ordinarily included with the prolongation or connection of the lateral lines of sidewalks at intersections; (2) any portion of a roadway distinctly indicated for pedestrian crossing by lines or other markings on the surface.

These warring definitions wouldn't be a problem if not for Minnesota statute 169.34.a.6, which proscribes parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk — marked or unmarked — at an intersection.

Everything now officially a blog

2008-05-14T16:35:00.013-05:00

Internet jargon; if used, explain that it means 'Web log' or 'Web journal'

There. There is it, the stylebook entry that the AP removed several years ago, when blog "become so common and so much a part of the language that it was no longer necessary."

The distinction between "blog means Web log" (true) and "blog is short for Web log" (untrue) is a subtle one, I get it. Maybe, if the AP entry had been a little more clear, copy editors would be going after that phony etymology like so many improper uses of the word podium.

What I don't understand is why here, now, in May of 2008, you're all using blog like some sort of catch-all for "anything written on the Internet."

(See that capitalized Internet? I did that for you. I'm sorry that I seem so angry right now.)

I've seen this many times before, but here's the lede that set me off today:

Burger King said Tuesday it fired two employees following the disclosure that an executive secretly posted blogs slamming a farmworker advocacy group.

The rest of the story ("Burger King fires 2 after blog controversy") doesn't mention blogs, just postings. Which is appropriate, because blogs were not involved in any way. It turns out that all the statements in question were made in comment threads.

Bloggerheads has a great roundup of what probably happened. Misusing blog is bad enough, but here are some useful words that should have been in the AP piece: comment, sock-puppeting, YouTube.

So how do you spot a blog? Definitions vary, but nowadays it's almost universally accepted that on a blog, content will be arranged in reverse-chronological order, i.e. with new stuff at the top. For much, much more on defining the weblog, check out my increasingly outdated master's thesis.

Or, here's a neat trick: substitute Web log for blog in your article. If you can't, you're probably misusing the word blog.