Posts
A bigger fish is Fry
There's some unevenness here.
On one end of the scale: I've been posting on here for almost 2 and a half years. I have a handful of kind readers and a pinch of occasional commenters. I get a lot of accidental browsers and few searchers who are asking a questions that I have specifically set out to answer--I've put up more than 200 posts. The highest comment total on a single post: 12.
On the other end of the scale: Stephen Fry has been posting for just under a month. Highest comment total on a single post: 292 (the other post has 278). He has posted twice.
Of course he has earned the attention with his fine contributions to acting and writing. Tho I'm not sure I can appreciate his recent contribution to writing: He calls his lengthy blog essays blessays.
I wonder if he's purposely going for the effect introduced by 'bless' showing up in the portmanteau. And I'm not sure why he doesn't just go with "post" or "entry"--the subject of my recent "postry". (That's probably worse than "blessay" but it's so close to the Spanish word for dessert that I'm keeping it.)
And what about "blisquisitions"? Bliss + inquisitions?
But his writing is good enough to support these slightly (and only possibly) presumptuous connotations.
Appropriately--his second post is all about being famous. At least he's qualified.
(via The Greenbelt)
Oh see, I read all the bl- formations as just another clever Stephen Fry bit, taking what he perhaps sees as the ridiculousness of the portmanteau "blog" (I think you can loosely apply "portmantau" to this case, if you count "web" and "log" as two separate words instead of an already-compound) and creating a set of second-order portmanteaus just to show us how ridiculous it is. And the other stuff...just follows suit. I think he's simply poking fun at the medium (why wouldn't he?).
ReplyDeleteYou know, often when people (including me) start blogs they're like, "OK ok, I've started one of these things. I know it's weird/dumb/stupid/silly. It's just an experiment, to see how it goes," like with all these disclaimers. Maybe his wordplay reflects similar hyperanalytically self-aware (I know Fry is hyperanalytically self-aware!) hesitation.
And THAT, my friends, was FAR too much text for the situation at hand. My first mini-blessay?
Oh yeah - so the simple point was,
ReplyDeleteblisquisition = blog + disquisition
blessay = blog + essay
Or was that apparent and the way you wrote the post, talking about bless/bliss, just obscured it??
Ah. Yes. The influence if "bless" contaminated my view of "blisquisitions" and threw a similar form in there.
ReplyDeleteI wondered if he was purposefully playing with the ridiculousness of the weB Log ESSAY frankenword in order to create a more hideous monster.
My guess was that he did that then he saw bless and 'bliss' in there (loosely) and he liked the layering so much that it made it into his header.
I forgot everything I had read above when it flashed across the billboard of my brain that I could now begin calling my big research project "my blissertation."
ReplyDeleteYES!
We all need to take more responsibility for what our ideas are doing to Casey.
ReplyDeleteI recognize that I was the relay between Fry's humor and Casey's downfall. I apologize to anyone that was hurt by my actions.
ReplyDelete