Well, it looks like I’ve found a new candidate for the coveted “Most appalling word ever” award. Aparently it’s not a new term, but until today, I’d been mercifully spared its awfulness. And then this morning, I was innocently browsing a Wordpress support thread and there it was. Blawg.

There are so many reasons to dislike this word, such as:

1. It sounds ugly
2. It’s a corruption of a word that is itself ugly
3. It opens the door to further ugliness. See blawg.org for further examples, such as the godawful plawdcast. I suspect the word blawgosphere lurks somewhere in there, too.

So, as you can see, it’s all a bit ugly.

The word blawg, comes from the word blog, which itself comes from weblog, which comes from the words web and log. I have nothing against the words web and log, only a slight grudge against the word weblog, and I won’t extend this post with my feelings about the word blog. I don’t know if it counts as a portmanteau word, or just a syllabic abbreviation (there doesn’t seem to be much distinction between the two), but I can’t help feeling it only exists because it can’t be shortened any further. Saying or writing weblog was obviously taking up too much time and space, so the world’s most eager keyboard thumpers decided to cut out a couple of letters (although if you put them back in but turn “weblog” into “we blog”, it’s a curious improvement.)

So. Blawg. Presumably, an early adopting lawyer spotted that the word law sounds a bit like the ‘lo’ portion of blog, and came up a the drawlish mixture of the two to make blawg. And what was wrong with the word blog? Or Law blog? I wouldn’t mind Law Blogging citizens so much, but it seems to be the way of the web that no word is ever specific enough for someone’s purpose, until it’s been chewed up and spat out repeatedly, and not many things tend to look more attractive after that.

Tags: ****