Still Not a Blog (A Glimpse Inside My Brain)

Once you unpack "blog" even a little, all sorts of problems fall out.

For starters, it's a corruption of "weblog," and right there you're replacing a compound metaphor for a nonsense syllable. And "weblog" is itself a corrupting contraction of either "web-log" or "web log," and I assert smashing those two words together conceals some useful information.

So let's take them apart. For simplicity I'm willing to accept "web" as effectively synonymous with "Internet," though if I am here making a close examination of words to see what we can learn, I have to point out that "web" is less synonym than subset. And certainly "web" and "Internet" do considerably different things, serve different connotative purposes.

And "log" comes to us from nautical terminology, meaning the place in which the daily technical details of the journey get recorded. In most cases when you try to draw the correlation between "log" and the kind of writing we're talking about, it's not accurate at all. It's a lazy metaphor. In most cases, "journal" would be far more accurate, but even that's not really right most of the time, not connotatively anyway, because "journal" implies "daily writing about the day itself," and that's not what I nor just about anyone is publishing on their so-called blogs.

Now I do recognize that "journal" comes etymologically from the Latin diurnalis by way of Old French and means "daily," and I am publishing daily, so this is a journal in the same way that some newspapers call themselves journal. I can accept that, but it's only accurate as far as it goes, and that's really not very far.

My point in all of this is that the things we call things matter. Words tell stories, and you don't have to go to the lengths I've gone to here to pick up a lot of that. Blog tells an attenuated, inaccurate story, and says it with a sneer. I refuse to saddle work I take seriously with such a term.

I still don't know what to call this thing now that I'm refusing anymore to call it a blog. On the other hand, I will take a moment to point out that if you're actually paying attention to the peculiarly writerly craziness I've got on display right now, you might be catching a glimmer of some of what I've got packed into the name Free Refills, and I promise you that it is zero percent an accident.

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