I really don’t like the word blog. It’s not aesthetically unappealing, but the letters aren’t particularly graceful. The sound of blog has even less finesse. I usually like succinct words, but this single syllable sort of lolls forward from your throat like a slothful bubble. Blog sounds especially repulsive when spoken through tears, let me tell you.
Blog is short for weblog, but that sounds clinical to me. It’s awkward to decipher all the letters that seem to have been assembled together to form a word that has yet to be definitively defined or understood in popular culture. It could be a collective verb, ‘we blog.’ But ‘we’ still excludes internet users who have never encountered a blog, or have encountered a blog but didn’t know what to make of it, or have avoided blogs entirely because they associate blogs with other, darker medias like, obviously, MySpace.
But what is a weblog, if not a log of the web? That’s how I’m looking at the Firefox extension that I installed over the weekend: StumbleUpon. My brother warned me, “Install at your own risk, it’s addictive, you’ll just have to click the button again,” and it’s true.
But if you’re bored with the internet, you need this extension!
I had gotten bored with the internet. Once I told my mom, a compulsive Freecell player, that I couldn’t understand why she would rather shuffle those cards than ‘surf the net,’ as they say. Yesterday, I watched over her shoulder while she played Freecell (she hates when I do that) and sighed and said, “there’s nothing left to see out there on the web.”
I knew that wasn’t true, but I needed a new way to find all that’s out there. Within an hour after installing this tool, I had fired off six e-mails, including two to myself, about links and sites that absolutely could not be missed.
But I’m very fastidious about adding links to my bookmarks list, partly because I am an obsessive categorizer and partly because I know they will just waste away in there. Thus, I’m going to share the favorite sites that I come across, collect them like trading cards and trade them with my friends, and I am starting this week with some links to linguistics-themed sites, to go with my analysis of the word blog. It still doesn’t sound very nice.
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