No such word as “blog”.

I did a Google search for “no such word as blog”. I was expecting to find many people writing treatises on the decline of the English language and where on earth have all these new words come from. I was disappointed! One poet complained it was such an ugly word, and couldn’t we use a word with more syllables (though he didn’t propose one), but mainly it was people speaking in the past tense about how “when I started this blog there was no such word as blog” etc. So how exactly did the word get into the language – and in the language it jolly well is, whether or not it’s in any particular dictionary or spell checker.

When new things are invented, we need to give them names so that we can talk about them without having to describe them each time. In the “good-old-days” inventions were made by inventors, or at least by companies, who then had the privilege of inventing a new name for their new article. This could be new word – like “television”, a combination of existing words (e.g. “Compact Disk”), or a new use for an existing word (“record”, to stick with the recording media example). But since the web era, things (like blogs) have been happening without being invented as such. And people start using words to name these things, and those words are then part of the language. But for a word to mean something, the speaker and the listener both have to know what it means. So how does a new word get into common usage? Well the answer has to be the media. Unless we’re really on the cutting edge of technology, we hear these new terms used in the news. Then we go and look them up and find out what they’re all about. And when we tell people about them, we use the term we heard in the media.

So why are so many of the new internet age words so dreadful; for example “phishing” to describe trying to get someone to reveal their password. Who thought of that and why on earth would anyone journalist give it the dignity of actually passing it on. Well I suppose the answer is that journalists are not very creative people. They just read a press-release, or someone else’s news story, and they repeat it parrot fashion to their readers/listeners/viewers, and so the words get passed on and used, whether they deserve it or not. But it doesn’t always happen that way. The decade between 2001 and 2010 still needs a name, and we’re already more than half way through. Several different names have been proposed for this decade, including the unbelievably crass “noughties”. Why on earth would anyone think of that, let alone use it? We don’t say “two thousand nought seven” do we? For two digit dates it’s more likely “oh seven”. And there’s nothing particularly naughty (which I assume is the allusion they were looking for) about this decade compared with any other. So I’m pleased to say that while I’ve heard a few people in the media attempt to create this term, I’ve yet to hear anyone use it seriously.

So where does that leave my blog. Actually I hate the word. It’s a rubbish word with a rubbish etymology and only one letter away from “bog”, the English slang for a lavatory. But it’s undeniably the word that we use to describe this kind of internet journal. (I checked the meaning of “journal” in the Oxford Dictionary, and apparently you have to update it every day to qualify as a journal.) So “blog” it is – it could have been worse!