Verbing 'blog' = YES!! / NOO!!

Verbing "blog"

Mar 16th 2011, 20:52 by G.L. | NEW YORK

A READER, davidnwelton, took me to task a few days ago for writing "I'll blog the experience" in my first post from the South-by-Southwest Interactive technology conference:

Can I make a suggestion for the Economist's style guide? Can you guys simply "write" about things? I don't care whether it's on line, or in the paper copy, or delivered to my Kindle, or if you etch it out in stone - it's writing and just because it's available on line doesn't mean it merits a new word, especially one that sounds like a problem that only a skilled plumber can resolve.

Ouch, and touché. I will confess that, immersed as I was in geek culture, I used "blog" not only as a verb (which we in fact do fairly often at The Economist) but as a transitive one. I searched for "blog the", one marker of transitive use, on our site, and while I can't be sure because the search also returns, for instance, "blog. The" and "blog, the", it seems I am probably alone in this sin. If our style-book editor learned of it he would surely roll his eyes and buy davidnwelton a stiff drink.

All the same, it's clear that outside our little haven of linguistic purity, the verb "blog", like "tweet" and "email", is developing its own rules of syntax. You can "blog about", "blog from" or just "blog" a conference (especially if you're "live-blogging" it). As evidence, below are two graphs from Google's wonderful Ngram Viewer, showing the prevalence of "blog" and "blog the" in books published in English from 2000 to 2008. While the prevalence of "blog" doesn't reveal how often the word is used as a noun and how often as a verb, the fact that "blog the" (the ngram viewer, unlike regular Google searches, distinguishes it from "blog, the" et al) increases at a similar relative rate suggests that the verbification of "blog" was roughly contemporaneous with the adoption of the word itself.

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/03/geek-speak