Blog.

That's a funny word.

Blog.

Supposedly comes from mashing "web log" together, but honestly, why call it a "web log" in the first place? Seems like kind of a strange thing to call it. I suppose it originated from when people were still calling it the "web" instead of the "internet" oh so many eons ago.

Many eons being, in this case, about ten years.

So someone started writing their thoughts out, thought it would be a cool idea if they showed them to other people using this fancy series of tubes, and called it a "web log." And then people decided that was a stupid name and really just slurred into "blog" anyway, so why not call it that?

And it stuck.

That's the story that I made up just now, and I'm sticking to it.

But honestly, words are strange. We don't think about it very much because we use them all the time, but I have this book that's buried in a case full of books sitting in my room right now because I don't have the space to put them... anyway I have this book. It's called L is for Lollygag: Quirky Words for a Clever Tongue. It's full of odd, rarely used words that are just fun to say aloud.

You know what, I'm going to dig it out so I can use an example.

Okay, here's a good one.

Peccadillo (pek-uh-DIL-oh) noun
A very small wrongdoing, nothing worth getting your underwear in a twist about.

Yes, that's a direct quote from the book.

Say the word out loud a couple of times. Use it in a sentence. Isn't it fun?

My junior year of college (last school year, for those of you who like keeping track), I would take a dry-erase marker and write up a "word of the day" on the tiles of our bathroom, encouraging my suitemates and I to use that word as much as possible.

'Course, it didn't quite work. I'd always forget to use the word after I'd written it up there, and before long I got lazy and it went from being a word of the day to being a word of the week to just not happening at all.

But I still think it's a good idea. From my perspective, the American vocabulary is not only shrinking, but also turning in a different direction, using lazier words, forgetting grammar, and not particularly caring if it gets something correct or not.

Is this a big deal? To me, it is. To many, it isn't.

I like words. They're interesting and I don't know nearly enough about them. So maybe I should start looking through this book some more.

Now, if you'll excuse me, three very small, very enterprising spiders are trying to make themselves at home on my ceiling. This is unacceptable.