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14 August
Was the word 'blog' really cut out by a fan of Merz - or did Daniel Defoe coin it in his A Journal of the Plague Year ? Soon on the trail...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 14, 2013
Bogus Derivations 'r' Us ?
In other words, the Internet being what it is (a dustbin with ~0.005 % reliable content), don't take seriously the etymologies that you read there, founded on the scholarship that led to The Hitler Diaries (and that fairly amusing film Schtonk ! (1992))...
So we are told that blog is short for web-log / weblog, but - I have to ask - who in the heck, other than some would-be Captain Kirk, would call such a thing such a thing ?
Captain's log, Stardate 45 point 78 point 69 B theta minus Cosine ABC
It's less whether we can establish that there is any truth in the assertion (which, of course - for a suitable Jim-Rockford-type daily rate plus expenses - one could look into) than choosing to swallow it. For me, I don't, because it sounds like a crap guess dressed up as Fact :
To my ear, blog sounds far more like the sound that a woodpecker sort of bird might make*, which - in its typical formulation - is what blogging is, the knock knock knock of sense out of our heads by the endless repetition of tired arguments, debateable points of view, and assorted nonsense that supposedly sounds good just for the saying.
Going back to Hitler and 'that whole endorsement thing' (as some would style it), possibly it is no more schocking than Ossian / Macpherson (in 1760), or what Wikipedia® calls the free-wheeling translations by Edward FitzGerald (I like that description) in the following century, but plus ça change is a bit of a cop-out, is it not ?
Anyway, my guns and pump are primed, so Anything could happen - all in the Best Possible Taste, Cupid !
As they say, Watch this space...
End-notes
* I need to check, in that facsimile of what T. S. Eliot really wrote (before Ezra Pound got his hands/ pen on it - no wonder Eliot states / quotes 'For Ezra Pound : Il miglior fabbro' at the front (in 1925) !), whether that bird-noise was notated in 'The Waste Land'.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
