"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
18 November 2003Je ne blog pasYou have to figure that a consonant-riddled monosyllable like "blog" — especially an English consonant-riddled monosyllable like "blog" — wouldn't sit well with the French. I don't know whether there's any official commentary on the subject, but I did spend some time poking around the French counterpart to Blogger, which is called Joueb.com, and it turns out that the derivation of "joueb" is not a whole lot different from that of "blog":
Un joueb (contraction de journal web) est un site web ou des informations sont publiees frequemment. Elles sont le plus souvent presentees par ordre chronologique et par categories.
Note: joueb est notre traduction du mot anglais blog (contraction de weblog). At least "web" figures into both of them. And it's "our translation"; they didn't wait for a decree from l'Académie Française, presumably sent by courriel. Joueb is an ugly little word, n'est pas? Sans doute, l'Academie will come up with a suitably lengthy and unweildy word. Posted by: Dan at 1:14 PM on 18 November 2003"Blog" isn't exactly euphonious, either: it has onomatopoeic value for people feigning polevault vomiting, but it grates on the ear otherwise. I hate that word, "blog." It feels like you're about to throw up. And I think the next time I find myself vomiting, I might actually attempt to say "blog" while I'm doing it, just to see. Posted by: Erica at 3:31 PM on 18 November 2003"Mama! Erica just blogged all over the living-room rug!" You know, it works. Well, I think telling some troll to get a joueb works on two levels, n'est-ca pas? Posted by: McGehee at 8:00 AM on 19 November 2003I do believe he's hit on something. Dear Mr. Troll: Get a joueb. Soon we'll see the current fashion for linking to blogs by articulate sex workers give way to a new trend for linking to online blog-jouebs.... (groan) Posted by: Vanessa, London, UK at 5:11 PM on 19 November 2003Not that there's anything wrong with articulate sex workers. Articulate what now? Posted by: McGehee at 6:42 AM on 20 November 2003It's like that time when we went to Mexico to try to score some of those constant-velocity joints we'd been hearing about. |