Every walk of life and field of endeavor generates its own insiders' lingo. Those of us in the MSM -- that's the superannuated, archaic mainstream media -- have our own jargon, of which the first sentence of an article is the lede, the early edition is the bulldog and the guys working into the wee hours make up the lobster shift.
Some of our special vocabulary is being stolen from us by the denizens of the world of Web logs. Above the fold -- the top half of a standard-size newspaper page, where the major stories begin -- now, in "blargon," is what we see on a blog's screen before we begin to scroll down. The jump -- the continuation of an article on an inside page -- is now a place to which the blog's readership is referred inside the Web site.
A sidebar -- which we fondly remember as a boxed, related article alongside the main newspaper article -- is, to a blogger, a column down one side of the screen displaying advertisements, archived links or a list of other blogs called a blogroll.
Even the reporter's byline, that coveted assertion of journalistic authorship, has been snatched by the writers derogated as "guys in pajamas" and changed to bye-line, an adios or similar farewell at the end of the blogger's politely expressed opinion or angry screed. (The prevailing put-down of right-wing bloggers is wingnuts; this has recently been countered by the vilification of left-wing partisans who use the Web as moonbats, the origin of which I currently seek.)
But what of the original terms being bandied about in what became known at 12:54am on Jan. 1, 2002, as the blogosphere, when William Quick posted the coinage on his blog, Daily Pundit?
The name blog is universally described as "short for Web log," but Jason Goldman, product manager for Google's blog-host Web site, Blogger, says that its meaning is different: "A Web log was and is `a log of requests that comes into a server;' it's the domain of techie people and no fun to look at. But blog, though coined from `Web log,' is a word open to all sorts of linguistic play that has taken on the meaning of `a personal web page.'"
That means it is time to send the world a ping about the link love or memes available to be tagged, as well as a friendly tip on deliciousing.
A ping is not just the word for a sound anymore. It is also an acronym for "packet Internet gopher," a program that tests whether a destination is online and can also be the gently noisy notification sent when a blog needs updating or has been updated.
Link love is "an unsolicited, posted link that aims only to amuse or interest." Other blogophiles call it linky love and stress a more intimate sense of reciprocity: "to link to another blogger because that person has linked to you." One who carries this yearning for online linkage to extremes is called a link slut or worse. Bloggers do not treat this as prurient, nor is "the discovery that some other blogger has posted an identical thought at the same time," which they call simultaneous blogasm.
"A meme is a type of online chain letter," explains Teli Adlam, a glossarian at blogossary.com, "where bloggers answer questions designed to give a quick overview of the blogger's personality."
The author is then supposed to tag -- that is, to induce -- other bloggers to participate by answering the same questions. Tag, as a noun, is a descriptive label applied to an individual post.
Delicious, though an adjective in standard usage, is both a noun and a verb in blargon: Adlam defines it as "a social bookmarking service that allows users to share their bookmarked sites with others. To del.icio.us someone is to add them to your delicious bookmarks. Many blog-gers strive to make it onto the del.icio.us front page (otherwise known as being popular)." This has led to the verbal noun or gerund deliciousing.
The darker side of the Web cannot be ignored by the blogerati (meaning "people sophisticated in operating blogs," derived from digerati out of glitterati, all three bottomed on literati).
Even MSM types know what spamming is: that was first reported in 1991 as the mischievous swamping of a network with unsolicited postings, and today denotes any unwanted messages in e-mail as well.
Biz Stone, author of the 2004 Who Let the Blogs Out? informs me that dotted is the word used to describe any site that is sending out bursts of traffic. It is rooted in the practice of the Web site Slashdot to send traffic to another site by linking to it. The recipient of all the traffic is said to be slashdotted. Stone defines spam blogs, splogs and zombie blogs in his glossary as "these strange animated robot-generated texts meant to game search engines. When it's published as unwanted feedback on people's blogs, it's called comment spam."
This brief survey -- a labor of link love -- was conducted by means of blogging. Thanks to the blogerati who shot my query around the Web asking for jargon, a solicitation that N'Gai Croal, technology editor at Newsweek, calls blegging.
He also notes, "Another good blog term is to fisk, from Robert Fisk, a UK journalist. That's when you take an article and reprint it on your blog, adding your line-by-line critique. It comes from bloggers doing that to Fisk's work, and now you'll hear `That was some fisking of Bush's State of the Union."'
not-so-super quote
During halftime at Super Bowl XL (Extra Large? No; 40), Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones performed Satisfaction, their 1965 hit. He pointed out in his introduction to the song that it could have been sung at Super Bowl I, adding, "Everything comes to he who waits."
That was a verbal malfunction more shocking than a previous Janet Jackson halftime. Because he is the subjective case of the third-person male pronoun, it cannot be the object of the preposition to. The pronoun must be the objective case him. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in an 1863 poem that called up the image of a patient falcon carved in wood, had it right: "All things come round to him who will but wait."
Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the “raising a lobster” trend make for irresistible China clickbait. However, the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw — the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user’s behalf — would likely burn out. Without some developer background, it is too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption,
A delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials led by Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is to travel to China tomorrow for a six-day visit to Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing, which might end with a meeting between Cheng and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). The trip was announced by Xinhua news agency on Monday last week, which cited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Song Tao (宋濤) as saying that Cheng has repeatedly expressed willingness to visit China, and that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and Xi have extended an invitation. Although some people have been speculating about a potential Xi-Cheng
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is leading a delegation to China through Sunday. She is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing tomorrow. That date coincides with the anniversary of the signing of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which marked a cornerstone of Taiwan-US relations. Staging their meeting on this date makes it clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intends to challenge the US and demonstrate its “authority” over Taiwan. Since the US severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, it has relied on the TRA as a legal basis for all
The ongoing Iran conflict is putting Taiwan’s energy fragility on full display — the island of 23 million people, home to the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing, is highly dependent on imported oil and gas, especially that from the Middle East. In 2025, 69.6 percent of Taiwan’s crude oil and 38.7 percent of liquified natural gas were sourced from the Middle East. In the same year, 62 percent of crude oil and 34 percent of LNG to Taiwan went through the Strait of Hormuz. Taiwan’s state-run oil company CPC Corp’s benchmark crude oil price (70 percent Dubai, 30 percent Brent)
RSS