I was reading something both interesting and a little asinine the other day. As some of you more educated folk may know, the French are highly defensive of their language. In the past few years they've really rallied against the influx of foreign (in particular, English) words into the vocabulary, actively discouraging the use of such words by creating alternatives in the native tongue. Recently, they (and by they I mean whoever it is in government that sits on their high horse and decides to dictate how the rest of the country should speak) decided to replace "e-mail" with the oh so French "courriel". Ecrivez-moi un courriel! Uh, yeah.

With the explosion of web logging, they've been hard-pressed to come up with a counter to the rampant use of the word "blog" by their intrepid and tech-savvy people. Ah, mon dieu, j'ai dit beaucoup des choses magnifiques, mais je n'ai pas un mot pour le décrire. Don't worry, Frenchy, there is now an official translation for the word "weblog". It's "Bloc Notes", which translates literally into "Note Pad". The shortened version is, well, simply "bloc". I suppose it's narrow-minded to think another country is being snooty by insisting on having their own words for everything, but come on. English speakers came up with the name "weblog" and "blog", so if that's what you're writing, then why not call it by its given name? We don't call it "funny dancing on your tiptoes in tights and a tutu", we call it "ballet". We use words like "espionage", "double-entendre", and "detente", and no one throws a hissy fit. If you're interested, you can check out more official translations for Internet-related words at this site, but it won't avail you much unless you can read French. Other words of note listed there are "trojan horse" ("cheval de Troie"), "logic bomb" ("bombe logique"), and the ever-so-clever "virus" ("virus"). Zut.

Wow, that was an excessive use of quotation marks, wasn't it?

Tags: Blogging, French