Check out this blog
Mar 18th 2011, 14:22 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK
MY COLLEAGUE posted Friday about "blog" as a transitive verb, which he rightly suspects our style editor would frown on, and which many other people dislike too. I don't particularly share the dislike of "I'll blog the conference" or "we'll live-blog the speech." But I have another "blog" problem. If I said "Check out this blog" to you, most blog habitués would say "ooh, new blog, let me add it to my RSS reader," perhaps, expecting a continuing sequence of posts on something interesting. I use "blog" to refer to Johnson, Democracy in America, Free Exchange and so on. But many people use "blog", the count noun, to mean a post. For them, this blog is called "Check out this blog," not "Johnson."
We sometimes peeve against peevology here on Johnson, yet this usage is a real peeve of mine. I can't shake it. Why do people say "oh, I'll write you a quick blog on that"? There's a nice noun, "post", that fills that role. Most bloggers, I think, use "post" and "blog" the way I do, but a minority (I just heard it from a colleague this morning) use "blog" the way that makes me clench my jaw a bit. There's probably not much I can do except wait for usage to settle, though. Blogs are still pretty new.
I hereby declare today an occasional Peeve Friday. Safely vent your own (perhaps-hard-to-justify, yet) unshakable peeves in the comments. It's a beautiful day in New York, and I'm hardly in a bad mood, so keep it clean and lighthearted. But we all have something that annoys like a canker sore every time we hear it. Let's hear yours.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/03/count_nouns
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