On Bibliobloggers
An interesting discussion has been going on over the past couple of weeks or so about the name "biblioblogger" and its different alternatives (see this useful summary).
I have deliberately stayed out of this exchange of proposals (until now...). The reason is quite simple: I, too, am one of those "boring and conservative" guys (Mark Goodacre's description) who's well served by the current term. As is often the case, the use of a word, not its etymology, is what counts in the final analysis. I don't know where this label came from, but I know what it means. And so does everybody else in this part of the blogosphere. So, what we've done here is take up a word, strip it of whatever original sense it had (if any), and give it a new meaning. What's wrong with that? The Bible is full of examples of this sort of thing. Various practices and words were taken up and given different meanings in Old Testament and New Testament times. Not that I would want to build a biblical case for the use of the term "biblioblogger" :-), but I certainly don't have anything to object to its widespread use.
I have deliberately stayed out of this exchange of proposals (until now...). The reason is quite simple: I, too, am one of those "boring and conservative" guys (Mark Goodacre's description) who's well served by the current term. As is often the case, the use of a word, not its etymology, is what counts in the final analysis. I don't know where this label came from, but I know what it means. And so does everybody else in this part of the blogosphere. So, what we've done here is take up a word, strip it of whatever original sense it had (if any), and give it a new meaning. What's wrong with that? The Bible is full of examples of this sort of thing. Various practices and words were taken up and given different meanings in Old Testament and New Testament times. Not that I would want to build a biblical case for the use of the term "biblioblogger" :-), but I certainly don't have anything to object to its widespread use.
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