I’ve decided to begin imparting some of my deepest inner thoughts to a website, and wow are they deep. Somehow I doubt that I will keep this up for more than… oh a week or so, but time will tell.
Everyone else seems to have a blog, so I am giving in to peer pressure, which any intelligent person should do. Seriously, if everyone else is jumping off of a bridge, they must see something coming that I don’t. The only logical way for me to proceed (being the logical person that I am) is to jump first, and ask questions later. Hesitation could be the difference between life and death.
There is a significant framework that should be established before anyone reads much more. Most of you know that I grew up in Africa and went to a boarding school in Kenya. This fact significantly colors my perceptions of reality on many issues. One of those perceptions that is perhaps more important than any other requires a bit of background to be established.
In our boarding school, a lingo evolved over time. Imagine hundreds of kids all confined to a campus for 3 months at a time with no television or other technological forms of entertainment. We did everything imaginable to entertain ourselves. One of our favorite pastimes was to invent words for our particular dialect, or to find new meanings for existing words. Consequently, to this day I have moments when I have to stop and think if what I’m about to say makes any sense in American English. One of our words that took on new meaning was “bog”. To us, a bog was a turd, and bogging was… well pooping.
The reason that this is so terribly important is that the word “blog” is just too close to bog, and blogging is of course too much like bogging. When you think you detect a snicker (like a giggle, not a snickers, because that would be gross) in my postings, well, it’s probably because I just thought about how I am blogging and the connotation immediately leapt to my mind of what I have heretofore mentioned.
Now that you are all thoroughly informed (and possibly slightly disturbed), you are armed with everything you need to read whatever I chance to say.
Everyone else seems to have a blog, so I am giving in to peer pressure, which any intelligent person should do. Seriously, if everyone else is jumping off of a bridge, they must see something coming that I don’t. The only logical way for me to proceed (being the logical person that I am) is to jump first, and ask questions later. Hesitation could be the difference between life and death.
There is a significant framework that should be established before anyone reads much more. Most of you know that I grew up in Africa and went to a boarding school in Kenya. This fact significantly colors my perceptions of reality on many issues. One of those perceptions that is perhaps more important than any other requires a bit of background to be established.
In our boarding school, a lingo evolved over time. Imagine hundreds of kids all confined to a campus for 3 months at a time with no television or other technological forms of entertainment. We did everything imaginable to entertain ourselves. One of our favorite pastimes was to invent words for our particular dialect, or to find new meanings for existing words. Consequently, to this day I have moments when I have to stop and think if what I’m about to say makes any sense in American English. One of our words that took on new meaning was “bog”. To us, a bog was a turd, and bogging was… well pooping.
The reason that this is so terribly important is that the word “blog” is just too close to bog, and blogging is of course too much like bogging. When you think you detect a snicker (like a giggle, not a snickers, because that would be gross) in my postings, well, it’s probably because I just thought about how I am blogging and the connotation immediately leapt to my mind of what I have heretofore mentioned.
Now that you are all thoroughly informed (and possibly slightly disturbed), you are armed with everything you need to read whatever I chance to say.
2 comments:
Yeah, the blog and the bog are just way to similar to differentiate. I thought when everybody was talking about their blogs they were actually talking about their bogs, which was beginning to disturb me a bit. So in attempting to differentiate between a blog and a bog I have come to the realization that a blog is supposed to be full of some type of useful information on someones life, where as a bog is well...a bog. Although there is absolutely no guarantee that a blog is not sometimes full of bog, I mean how much can you really write about yourself without one day having nothing to write about and stumbling into the category of mixing blog with bog. So if you are not from rva and you are horribly confused, bog, bogging, and to be bogged can actually have more than just one definion. Thanks, the anonymous thinker
I'm fascinated by the idea of a bunch of kids coming up witht heir own dialect, and that dialect becoming so all-encompassing that you have to think whether it's standard English or not. It kind of makes me jealous that I didn't get to participate in that.
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