Saturday, July 28, 2007

The Lexicon of Blog

Although I have said that I will not write anymore about blogging and the discourse of blogs, I couldn't resist reprinting this tidbit from the British newspaper The Telegraph, which modestly touts itself as having "Britain's no. 1 quality newspaper website." The Times and The Guardian might dispute that claim, but this snippet by Mark Sanderson from their July 19 "Literary Life" column was quite informative and darkly entertaining.

"Lexicographers at Oxford University Press have been monitoring the use of English in web-logs in order to update the Oxford English Corpus which provides the basis for their dictionaries. This is no mean task: there are now more than 70 million blogs around the world and 120,000 new ones are created every day.

"They have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as 'bloglish'--surely the ugliest neologism since Crimplene--but an analysis of the words most used by bloggers suggests that a word is needed for the self-obsessed stream of impoverished English used by most writers on the web.

"For the record, the top 15 most frequently used words are: blogger, blog, [shit], oh, yeah, stupid, post, ok, stuff, lovely, myself, update, nice, me and my."

Apparently most bloggers are even more self-regarding than even I had thought.