As people get all retrospective around this time, you start seeing all the lists of things people loved or hated about the previous year. One of the things that comes up on my radar is “new words” — usually including or consisting of words people wish would go away.

Take “blog” for example. I’ve heard this one disparaged over and over for the past few years. “Oh, it’s just so stupid, it’s just a fad anyway, I wish it would go away.” “‘Diary’ and ‘journal’ should be used! It sounds dumb, like a new beverage or something.”

No, no and no. Yes, there is something of a fad to blogging, but it is also here to stay, so being annoyed with it as a “fad” word is pointless. It’s not the same as “diary” or “journal”. A diary or journal is a periodic record of events, experiences, thoughts, etc. — which is private. A blog is public, more akin to a newspaper (but it’s not a newspaper) or magazine (but it’s not a magazine). There are personal ones and commercial ones, but they all share two unique features besides being public: automated publishing, and organization in reverse chronological order.

Note that a blog is similar to a diary, journal, newspaper or magazine, but significantly different. The whole point of useful words is that they stand in for more elaborate concepts. Kind of like “brisk” means “invigoratingly cold” and not just “cold.”

So we could all give up “blog” and start saying “automated electronic journal,” but I’m not going to go around saying ten syllables when I can say just one instead.

As for complaints that it sounds weird, would you prefer “ediary”? Blecch. Or how about “iJournal”? Gag me with a spoon. I think blog is just right, especially when you remember it’s short for weblog (which is about as dumb as ediary or ijournal — because, get it? — it’s a log that’s on the web!) So thanks, but no thanks. I’m going to keep saying “blog.” The alternatives are worse.

Words are a technology, and like all others, will stop being used when people derive no benefit from using them or something better comes along. You might not like it all the time, but you’re stuck with it, and if that gives you the mulligrubs, well, tough caca.

Prompted by a segment about new words on NPR this morning, Alex said words should go away when they can be defined by one other word. “Just stop being pretentious and use the other word!” she said. Yeah, I can agree with that. And in a living language, such redundant words will go away eventually, or the original word will go away. Or different regions may use both, like “soda” and “pop.” (Only morons waste effort saying “soda pop.”)

Grammar is important and should be rigorously adhered to. The same goes for spelling. Vocabulary should be more flexible. If you don’t like it, move to France, where they keep the official language static, and only allow new words by committee. Good luck getting on the committee.

There’s a good article on new words in the Denver Post (which, by the way, ends with a nice list some of 2005′s “new, reinvented or mainstreamed words”). From the article:

The New Oxford American Dictionary, for instance, introduced more than 2,000 words onto its pages in 2005, and the website wordspy.com offers daily entries for those who want to remain in the know.

“Coining a word is a cool thing, and there are a lot more of them now because more people have the power to disseminate them,” says Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary. “We’re especially finding new words on blogs because they aren’t professionally edited.”

I wonder if new words were as prevalent before, but just weren’t noticed or didn’t catch on as much because they weren’t recorded like they are in blogs.

As for what makes a good new word, they also mention words as a technology:

Not every made-up word is destined for the dictionary. “What we’re looking for is something that’s useful. Your dictionary is a tool box. We don’t want minuscule, left-handed monkey wrenches in there. Words have to be good descriptors of the world.”

Words also need to be important and interesting and even fun, otherwise they fall prey to Darwinian devices.

Like “webinar” probably will be. Yeah, that’s just stupid.

Finally, the article also mentions double-speak, or words as obfuscation and disinformation. I think the quote at the end of the article is apt in general when it comes to people’s willingness to accept new words these days, despite their true usefulness: “Part of the problem is that it has become so commonplace and (the population) has become immune to it. We take the terms that have no meaning or very little meaning and accept them instead of asking for the truth.”