Anyway, your comment is one of the best laughs I’ve had in some time. Thanks.

*vomits on keyboard*

No arguments from me on the usefulness/definition of “blog.” I think that some members of her faculty didn’t associate “blog” with “content management system” but with “inappropriately personal rantings of a egomaniac,” and so never even clicked through to see that her blog was professional and relevant.

I have nothing against neologisms that actually say something new. I started out believing that “mashup” didn’t say anything new, at least as it relates to software. Now? I’m not sure.

“Blog”/”weblog” is a nice compact term for a lightweight web content management system that typically presents items in reverse chronological order (“frequently updated” and “library news” are both aspects of some blogs, but certainly not most). As such, it’s distnctly useful. It gets messy when advocates assert that “it isn’t a blog unless [x]“, where [x] could be “it supports comments” or “it’s updated frequently” or “every post includes hyperlinks” or some other specious narrowing of the tool’s definitions.

I’m glad you wrote the original post. I guess I have a relatively high tolerance for nelogisms, so it is nice to be reminded that many people don’t, or that they have extra associations with a word that I don’t have. I remember Kris Johnson saying in her presentation for Higher Ed Blog Con that some of her faculty reacted very negatively to her library news blog simply because she called it a “blog.” If she had called it a “reverse-chronological, frequently-updated, library news website,” they probably wouldn’t have had any problem with it.

Hmm. Other verbicides? “Deconstruct,” now used to mean “analyze” drives me bats.

OK, I’m convinced. “Mashup” has a legitimately distinct meaning in Web2.0 terms. So much for offhand Saturday morning posts…

But I have, in general, far more sympathy for neologism than I do for what CS Lewis called “verbicide” in Studies in Words–murdering a word, often by inflating its meaning. “Awesome” is the classic late 20th century verbicide; “aggravating” is another. I’m on the verge of giving up on my insistence that “impact” is not a verb, but I’m not quite there yet. . . .

It was flagged as spam…

Probably because it was a snarky comment only one half step above spam. I’d say the spam filter was doing its job…

I think it’s because it sounds more evangelical, like preaching the gospel or something.

Whoops.