Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
It's a blog post, not a freakin' blog
For the record, and for the benefit of people who really should know better – namely, people with blogs:
- The container is a blog.
- The entries held within it are blog posts.
- That’s it. It’s pretty simple.
Please stop inviting people to read your “latest blog.” It makes you sound like a moron and makes the pedants among us want to start pulling teeth. With pliers.
Thank you.
Today’s post sponsored by six bloggers, two “social media specialists,” one journalist, and by the letters P, M and T.
13 Nov 2008
| In: Crankypants |
Ah gwan tell us what a ‘social media specialist’ really is!!! I’m dying to know!
13.11.2008, 12:33 amI also hate this, but never enough to write a blog about it.
Oh yes, I went there. ^_^
13.11.2008, 12:33 amDear Suzy:
Fucked if I know.
Dear Mick:
You were beaten to the punch.
Love,
Sabrina
It grates on my ears & eyes (ouch) too. Like something my ma would say. She who uses the terms internet, email and facebook completely interchangeably.
Anyway, “blog” (I’ve always thought) is a pretty ugly and lumpy word – even without mis-use.
Blog.
Blog.
Blog.
See what I mean?
13.11.2008, 12:48 amFustar, yes totally. I try to be patient with people who are not so conversant in all things interwebs, but I do have to restrain myself from attempting to explain that while it is indeed “the internet” it is not “the email” or “the Facebook.”
Arrrrgh….
Well you’re also dealing with the Irish tendency (and it comes straight from our “native tongue”) to put “the” before all nouns. As in “Isn’t the email marvelous, altogether?” or “I see you’re big into the facebook now!”
My wife (English) finds it priceless.
13.11.2008, 1:10 amAh (and I know many of your regular readers will contradict me if I’m wrong), but free use of the definite article is a feature of Irish (and to a lesser extent, Scots) English
So to your USian ears, ‘the email’ is wrong. But not to mine. And as I’m after seeing you increasingly using Irish idiom in your tweets, I’m surprised you’re so harsh on the usage.
13.11.2008, 1:11 ami blame the myspace.
13.11.2008, 1:31 am[...] of which, Sabrina’s latest blog cracks me [...]
13.11.2008, 6:40 amI blame it on the Price Watch column in the Irish Times that invites readers with opinions to “write, blog or text”.
I once wrote a letter to the editor. Therefore I am a journalist?
13.11.2008, 8:03 amNicely said.
13.11.2008, 9:17 amFustar and Martin, I absolutely accept that it’s an Irish grammatical construction and thus entirely appropriate.*My* mother, however, is neither Irish nor in Ireland and she says both of those things.
In other words, she is just the old.
Primal – yes! There’s always a link to the blog at the bottom of the print column each week prefixed “Blog on here” – wtf does that even mean?!
This has been bugging me for ages, Sabrina, well tackled.
13.11.2008, 10:01 amThank you for that post! Can I respectfully request membership of the Association of Pedantic Bloggers?
Fustar – I agree about the hideousness of the word, compounded by a near-impossility to get it understood when you don’t use “write” in the same sentence: I study blogs. You study what?
13.11.2008, 10:17 amWhat about when people refer to comments as posts, as in, “If you even read my last post above, you’d know what I meant”!
13.11.2008, 10:18 amPriceless! Brought to you by the letters…
Thanks for cheering up may day.
13.11.2008, 10:29 amTurgon on Slugger does this all the time. It is the fucking annoying.
13.11.2008, 10:50 amI often hear my mother asking my younger Brother , Are you on the Bebo ?
13.11.2008, 11:25 amOn the parental side, my mother frequently enquires now about my blobbing, if I’m on the blob and whether I could show my relatives the blob that I’m on.
Try as I might to explain…
But yes, sign me up for pedantic bloggers too. Or blobbers. Whatever.
13.11.2008, 11:32 am“Are you on the Bebo?”
I wonder if that’s because the perception among a non net generation is that it’s just another form of “de telly” or “de wireless”?
In the newspapers
On the television
On the radio
On the internet/blogs/facebook/bebo
I must ask my mother, who rang me to tell me that my face were coming to Dublin so I could get a job.
13.11.2008, 11:36 amvery interesting, I guess it stems from the old saying, are you on the telephone to ask, Do you have a phone.
Or my Rev often esquires when trying to find out someones email address, Are you on the computer at home ?
13.11.2008, 11:38 amI’m glad I never have to worry about it since I class all my blog posts as “rants”, so all I have to say is “Read my latest rant”.
The only place you find the word blog on my site is in the navbar – since calling it rants might make it harder to understand.
Or would it…?
* runs off and changes *
13.11.2008, 11:43 amOh, How you make me laugh. The letters P, M and T.
13.11.2008, 11:47 amSo I should come bearing chocolate when I visit later?
….hopefully your mail parcels that I deliver will cheer you up.
Love,
Your Postmistress
(ooh! that sounds quite naughty, doesn’t it?!)
x.
Can you tell my dad he doesn’t need to defraggle his hard drive?
13.11.2008, 12:50 pmThe one that gets me is “going into” websites/things on the internet.
“I went into google and searched for Tractor tyres”
13.11.2008, 1:24 pm“When I went into facebook I noticed that all of my friends have red hair”
As I always say — people read a little about something, pick up some buzz words, and then they are experts. Feels good to vent a little. Thanks Sabrina for saying what we were all feeling! Ann
13.11.2008, 1:30 pmGlad I’m not the only one. Every time I hear someone say that I want to shake them and knock some sense into them!
13.11.2008, 2:11 pmYour mother wouldn’t *be* the old; she would *have* the old (on her) an bhfuil?
Now the thing that *really* bugs me is “logging onto” a site. BBC are particularly bad with that usage. No, unless you’re actually providing username/password, you’re merely visiting.
13.11.2008, 5:54 pmI say “the Facebook” on purpose… lol I find it rather funny.
13.11.2008, 11:43 pmOh, I have another one: “Do you have the Internet*?”, meaning do you have a broadband service.
* With a small I of course. We master pedants will only use “internet”, with a lower case I, to denote any set of two or more connected networks.
14.11.2008, 6:19 amLOL, love it! :) “Blog site” gets to me too!
14.11.2008, 6:25 pmRe pet language hates, why in god’s name do we make up garbage names in Irish for something that is a new invention?
Idirghréasán
Apparently this is the new Irish word for the internet ?????
Why? Is internet not good enough?
Though there is now a great opportunity to have a competition to name the word that will be blog in Irish. A few suggestions:
Blogaéiocht
Bléagheadgoaéigí
An Blóg
spideoriacht
Any others?
14.11.2008, 7:19 pmI remember Sorley Maclean telling of a time when people said that (Scots) Gaelic would be a relevant modern language when it had a word for Spaghetti. To which he replied that he was looking forward to hearing the English word for it.
In a similar (yet strangely opposite) vein: Irish (and Gaelic) should worry about a native idiom for Internet when they improve upon Gaelicised-Anglified Greek for Television.
An fear seo: telebhisean agus rèidio
14.11.2008, 8:42 pm@Michael Flanagan you’re right up there maverick-wise with the likes of John McCain
15.11.2008, 1:47 am[...] recent blog post (or as Sabrina Dent would say, a blog) by Kristen Osenga (guest blogger at the legal group blog Concurring Opinions) contains quite a few [...]
21.11.2008, 12:02 amI was flicking through the marking scheme of the Junior Cert English course last year. And it said ‘Write a blog on a topic of your choice.’ Oh boy was I tempted to write to the department that the person who composed that ENGLISH exam obviously had no grasp of English or modern terminology and they should stop f****** writing stuff they don’t have a clue about. Urgh
- End Rant -
07.03.2009, 11:48 pmSuper-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again – taking your feeds too now, thanks.
I’m Out! :)
11.01.2010, 4:44 amYes, but I dislike it much more when a website is referred to as a “Homepage”!
Ridiculously inaccurate, and makes it really confusing when I need to refer to.. ahem.. the Home page of a website.
Patty
06.02.2011, 6:43 pm (subscribed to comments)Russell McQuillan, I’m just really curious: what does this mean:
“Or my Rev often esquires…”
Something to do with a religious leader who pretends to be a lawyer? Or reads mens’ magazines?
Talk about odd use of language.
06.02.2011, 6:49 pm (subscribed to comments)