Bloc Head

Monday May 23rd 2005, 2:31 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:Language, Social Software
Posted By: Matt

Loic Le Meur points to the new official French translation for “blog”. They went with “bloc-notes”, which literally means a notepad, because it can be abbreviated as “bloc” and thus sound a bit like the English equivalent.

Very clever. Well I hate it. The cool thing about “blog” is that it is a neologism that comes from “weblog” and thus has a bit of hi-tech panache. “Bloc-notes” sounds pitifully mundane. I love French culture, French food, the French language and a bunch of other French stuff, but they have to get a clue and realize that some anglicisms just sound cooler than anything dreamed up after the fact by a committee of uptight language extremists. The good news is that there’s little to no chance that anyone will actually use the new term.


5 Comments »

  1. Right on! You can bet your head that no one is ever going to say “j’ai passé la soirée sur mon bloc”, or “j’ai bloqué (?) toute la nuit…”. And what about the “blocosphère”???

    The French academy has coined other terms that are totally ridiculous, like the French equivalent to CD Rom: “cédérom”…

    Comment by seber — 5/23/2005 @ 2:48 pm

  2. “J’ai bloqué toute la nuit.” ROFL.

    Sebastien, you’ve demonstrated conclusively why this is so, so wrong!

    Comment by Matt — 5/23/2005 @ 4:53 pm

  3. As we say in France: MDR. The Academy has not standardized this one yet ;-)

    (Gee, I had to look up ROFL… http://www.linux-france.org/prj/jargonf/R/ROFL.html)

    Comment by seber — 5/23/2005 @ 4:57 pm

  4. De blogueur à bloc-noteur …

    Trackback by Jacques FROISSANT Altaïde — 5/27/2005 @ 11:40 am

  5. Prescriptionism is so unscientific. And it’ll never work as a means to preserve a language.

    Comment by gracefool — 5/29/2005 @ 3:04 pm

Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)