Alan Jacobs

A Blog of One's Own

It is an odd thing, this culture of blogging. I am still not fully at home with it. The very word blog makes me wince. It is an ungainly term, ugly to look at on the page and even uglier to hear spoken. Gelatinous. The word comes dangerously close to blob . If I had to pick a visual correlative for the term, it could only be this: Somewhere in the pudding of phonetic associations, is blah and blab . Worse, frog —as Emily Dickinson used the word:
How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!
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