rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2001-03-17 (05:40:35)
In which our plucky young hero talks serious about talking funny.

How exactly did an activity as honorable and widespread as keeping an online journal get such a horrible name? Blog. Blog blog blog. It looks like onomatopoeia for throwing up, or crippling pain in the small intestine.

"Oh man, that burrito isn't sitting too w--blog!"

"I'm not cleaning that up, dude."

Oh, I know, it's short for "web log", but really, why were these things called web logs in the first place? It's because the activity was built by geeks, that's why.

These are people who deal mostly with the written word, not the spoken one (I should know, I'm one of them; I use the telephone and in-person meetings for my job out of habit, not necessity). It's easy to type lots of things that you find awkward to say. That's why resources on the Web begin with "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash dubbayoo dubbayoo dubbayoo dot". (And heaven forfend you should leave out that http://. There's more to the Internet than just the Web and I was on Usenet when they didn't even have two Dixie cups and blah blah and so forth.)

I'm not saying that we need to turn over the naming of geekish things to, you know, professionals, but here's a simple test when you're giving a name to something: say it out loud a hundred times. If you can't do so without stumbling or getting bored or thinking "Gad, it sounds like I'm about to throw up", the name's just all wrong.

sirilyan.diaryland.com | sirilyan dotcom
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