While waiting for my computer to boot up this morning, I read a neat piece by Sarah Boxer in the New York Review of Books, capsulizing the effect of blogging on Life as We Know It (or LAWKI). Wish I could give a link to this, without your having to subscribe to the NYRB, although that would be money well spent.
Sarah accompanied her article with a list of 10 books about blogging, which I was happy to see included one I fact-checked for Wiley Publishing a few months back: Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. (After it appeared, Shel wrote on his own blog: "The most annoying member of the Wiley team was the fact-checker. I don't even know the son-of-a-bitch's name, but my partner and I are forever grateful." That may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me as an editor.)
The NYRB article convinced me (as if I weren't convinced already) that this little blog is antediluvian and hopeless chained to traditional English expression. Obviously, I'll never claw my way up the Google food chain.
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2 comments:
"Antediluvian," huh? Yes, that's exactly what the earliest television enthusiasts said about motion pictures. ;-)
For some reason this reminds me of when computers were first put to use in the publishing industry (giving away my age here). When I was first given a computer (way back in the DOS days), my publisher predicted that in a few years, the company wouldn't have to use paper at all. Currently, the company uses five times the amount of paper that it did 20 years ago, for the same number of employees and books produced per year.
"Antediluvian." The chances are good that most copy editors from about now on will never have to know the correct usage or spelling of this word. In the information age, when history is only nano-seconds back, a more popular expression for things that happened a long time ago might be "before Katrina" or "before 911." The word antediluvian, defined as "before the big flood of Noah's time," may have already flown through the big hole.
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