Blogorrhea. Blogolalia. Veroblog and Blog-o'nuts. What's all this then?
BLOGORRHEA. I just made this word up. (Well, I haven’t seen it anywhere
else.) It’s related of course to logorrhea, an “excessive flowing of words,”
which is related to diarrhea, which comes from
dia, “through,” and
rhein, “flow” via Middle English, Latin, and Greek.
I’ve noticed quite a lot of blogorrhea. I receive a lot of it via email.
I’m sure you do, too. I don’t know quite how I got on all those lists,
and I don’t read every blog I receive every morning, but I find the ones
I read interesting. Since late last year, I’ve been writing more blogs,
not only this monthly blog for my website but also regular blogs for
Feminism and Religion. Take a look. I think you’ll find blogs there
to enjoy, too. But I think I must be their divergent thinker; they’re all
wise and earnest, and here I am writing parody.
The word “blog,” which I just Googled and got 13,970,000,000 hits for,
comes from “
web log.” A web log is a short personal essay published (posted) on
the World Wide Web. Wikipedia credits “web log” to Jorn Barger, who seems
to have first used the term in 1997. The short form, “blog,” Wikipedia
goes on, “was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog
into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April
or May of 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used ‘blog’
as both a noun and verb.”
And now it seems that practically everyone blogs. Well, we all have opinions
and we’re all entitled to express them. I almost wrote “we’re entitled
to express them as long as we don’t commit libel or hurt anyone,” but that
distinction seems not to exist anymore. We get spam blogs. We get attack
blogs. We get bigoted blogs. We get opinions along the whole continuum
of dumb to wise. Everybody’s got something to say. There’s a whole lot
of blogorrhea. Not that that’s a bad thing—
—I started writing this a couple weeks ago, but then I got distracted
by my real work. My mind does not shut off while I’m editing, however,
and I’ve come up with more bloggish words. Here we go.
BLOGOLALIA. We find glossolalia in the Bible; it’s speaking in tongues,
which happened after the first Pentecost when those flames lit up on people’s
heads. People in some churches still indulge in glossolalia, which the
American Heritage Dictionary defines as “fabricated nonmeaningful speech.”
The sounds that babies make as they’re experimenting with learning to talk
is also sometimes called glossolalia. When I was writing
Finding New Goddesses, I Found (made up) Panglossolalia, whose
name is a portmanteau word. It’s the name of Dr. Pangloss, the professor
in Voltaire’s short novel
Candide who teaches that everything happens for the best in the best
of all possible worlds, conflated with glossolalia. In my book, Panglossolalia
delivers an infomercial. A portmanteau word is what happens when two words
are telescoped as one. The term was invented by Lewis Carroll, who explained
that in “Jabberwocky” the word “frumious” is a portmanteau word made of
“fuming” and “furious.” What I’m doing with this blog is creating portmanteau
words around “blog.” We find blogolalia in people (
moi?) who never know when it’s time to stop writing. They’re also
afflicted with BLOGOMANIA. When we’re reading and writing and forwarding
blogs all the time, we’re probably suffering from BLOGOHOLISM and may need
a twelve-step program. (Hello, my name is Verbena. I’m the Found Goddess
of Wordplay and Really Awful Verse and I’m a blogoholic.”) Or maybe we’re
just indulging in BLOGOMANCY, which is not quite the same as cartomancy.
BLOGARIA. This is “blog” plus “aria,” a melody or solo vocal piece in
an opera. A blogaria would thus be really good writing with sentences that
flow like music. As I was standing in the shower a few minutes ago, I was
thinking how to make other forms of this word. Perhaps one who writes blogarias,
a superblogger, is a BLOGARIST? A BLOGARIATRIST? How on earth to pronounce
that? English, like classical Greek, often likes to put the accent on the
penultimate syllable, so my best guess is blog-air-ee-AT-rist. I just invented
the word and now I have to figure out how to pronounce it, too. Pronunciation
is important, of course. Victor Borge used to get a big laugh when he talked
about opera and how the soprano sings her “die-aria.” It came out “diarrhea.”
He had an accent and he was extremely intelligent; of course he did it
on purpose.
BLOGOCRACY. What if it comes to this? That “cracy” syllable indicates
government or rule and comes to us via the Latin
cratia from the Greek
kratos, “strength, power.” It’s a favorite of people who create portmanteau
words—mobocracy and kleptocracy, for example. So picture this. We’ve got
blogariatrists (who write blogs we agree with) and BLOGIDIOTS (whom we
don’t agree with), and they’ve all got access to the Internet. All the
time. Some bloggers are influential. But what if the blogidiots start getting
themselves elected to public office? We might end up with a blogocracy,
which would be, as Macbeth said, “full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”
Forgive me if I sound cynical, but what happens when the House of Representative
discovers literacy? Oh, they have. Well, that explains the signs their
followers keep waving. And their constant appeals for money.
VEROBLOG. The “vero” syllable comes from the Latin
verus, “true,” and related words are “veracity,” “verisimilitude,”
and that ever-useful little adverb “very.” I guess a verb or adjective
becomes truer if you modify it with very. Presumably a veroblog is one
containing
true facts, as opposed to the other kind, which we get in politics
and advertising. Like beauty and morality these days, however, veracity
seems to be situational, so one person’s veroblog may be another’s BLOG-O’NUTS.
Ya gotta watch out. Perhaps blogs expressing stupid opinions can also be
called ILLEGITIBLOGS. It’s time to wrap this up. But wait! I haven’t even
gotten to BLOGOSOPHY and BLOGOLOGY yet. Knowing that the “sophy” comes
from the Greek
sophos, “wise,” and the “logy” comes from the Greek
logos, “word,” you can no doubt supply your own definitions. How
many other bloggish words can we make up? Is there a better way to have
fun?
