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"Blog" Deemed A Real Word By William Safire
All those journalists from the trenches can add a notch to their belts for a lexicographical victory: the formal induction of the word blog to American English. William Safire is doing the honors in his "On Language" column for the New York Times Magazine:
"Will the blogs kill old media?" asked Newsweek, an old-media publication, perhaps a little worried about this disintermediation leading to an invasion of alien ad-snatchers. My answer is no; gossips like an old-fashioned party line, but most information seekers and opinion junkies will go for reliable old media in zingy new digital clothes. Be that as it may (a phrase to avoid the voguism that said), the noun blog is a useful addition to the lexicon.Dave Winer of Scripting News, who spread the word on his own web log, couldn't help but celebrate:
I learned... that Safire is the authority on American English. So blog is now a very real word. It will be in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Safire has written it up. We all did something real. Jorn Barger, Blogger, the Frontier community. Congrats to one and all!I've read comments that blog sounds like an onomatopoeia for someone loosing their cookies, so I'm not so sure that English has been enriched by the addition. That said, the evolution of language is unstopable, and the vocabulary gestapo can only point at it as its constant degradation.
