In a lecture the other day, I had a slide on “neologisms” to illustrate the concept of productivity. This was in Linguistics 101, a course populated by undergraduates from a wide variety of majors, and I thought I’d use “weblog” as an example of a neologism. So I pointed to “weblog” on the slide and asked what the word meant. Silence. This is a tough class to crack as it’s in the evening and they’re tuckered out and digesting, so I often have to resort to calling on individual students. No worry, I thought, as it’s an easy question for someone to answer, and it’s just their general disinclination to speak in class that’s causing the blank stares. I choose a name from the list. The student in question looks up at me with the same blank stare. “Umm, do you mean ‘blog’?” she asks, and then provides the definition.<\/p>\n
It is actually the case that ‘weblog’ has ceased to function as a denoting term amongst this age group, having been supplanted by the catchier ‘blog’, thereby obscuring the etymology.<\/p>\n
I felt just a tiny bit old after that class.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a lecture the other day, I had a slide on “neologisms” to illustrate the concept of productivity. This was in Linguistics 101, a course populated by undergraduates from a wide variety of majors, and I thought I’d use “weblog” as an example of a neologism. So I pointed to “weblog” on the slide and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,24],"tags":[33,43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":190,"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tractorfeed.com\/strictlyspeaking\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}