Even those zany logomaniacs at Merriam-Webster dictionary have jumped on the bandwagon, crowning “blog” their “word of the year”.¹

— from Kevin “Baroque-a-Nova” Chong’s new weekly column, “Blog Report”, in The Vancouver Sun

When a staid daily like The Vancouver Sun starts publishing a column on blogs you have to ask yourself whether it might finally be time to pop the golden parachute and get out of the litblog business entirely. “There goes the neighborhood” we said to ourselves on Saturday. “The party’s over now.”

We remember when our board first contemplated the infrastructure requirements for this vast enterprise: the satellites, the fibre-optic cabling, the blinking lights. They knew the cost was high because they were breaking brave new ground. But the death-knell of print had been sounded and they forged ahead: “New Media Pioneers” they called themselves, and had T-shirts printed to that effect.

For years we had the field all to ourselves. True, it was a field strewn with boulders: those early years were hard ones. We could tell you chilling tales about the times we’ve gone home hungry, only a paragraph or two to nibble on all day. Joyce, if the web-counter had ticked into the double digits; just a few pared-down sentences of Hemingway’s on leaner days; it was barely enough to keep a young web-logger alive.

But like the true electronic bohemians we were we thrived on our obscurity, we combed our soul-patch, played our bongos loudly and we laughed.

And now the damned media spotlight is being brought to bear; now Ol’ Man Print has decided “if we can’t compete, let’s try and make it look as if we care”. Some sympathy for the awkward position Kevin Chong is in, and credit for knowing the thin ice he’s treading on:

A newspaper column about blogs and blogging reeks of the same putrefying squareness as Frank Sinatra covering the Beatles.

As Frank himself might have put it: “You dig it Daddio; you dig it good…” (snap, snap, snap)

• • •

¹ As we at t&p have grumbled elsewhere, we choose to run counter to the “blog”-word trend. Whenever possible we try to reverse the linguistic tectonics which saw two perfectly acceptable words: “web” and “log”, forced onto a collision course. Powerlessly we watched while forces beyond our control jammed these two defenseless words together into one compound word (“weblog”) and then crushed them further, monosyllabalizing that hybrid into “blog”. The editorial collective unanimously deplore this move.

“What next?” we ask querulously. “Are we so pressed for time that we must trim all linguistic fat from our discourse? Are we to end up speaking in clipped sentences, terse asides tossed over our shoulders as we race to our next engagement?”

As evidence of our resolve we are founding a new movement, and hereby put out a call for members in The Re-syllabification Reserve.

The Re-syllabification Reserve calls for the restoration of excised syllables to words which have been crimped, cramped, gelded or otherwise diminished through common usage. “Why ‘bit’”, we ask, “when ‘binary digit’ has so nice a ring?” (We are also calling for the return of “no” to “can’t”)

Join us: with your help we shall eventually prevail.