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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, December 02, 2004

***BLOG*** most requested word of the year.



UD has been studying with interest the just-released Merriam-Webster's list of this year's ten most requested words. "Blog," as many people have already noted, is number one, and UD, une blogeuse tres enthousiaste (a recent check of UD's traffic reveals a healthy number of French readers, to whom UD intends to pander), is of course pleased about this.

Somewhat disturbing, though, is the rest of the list:



1. blog
2. incumbent
3. electoral
4. insurgent
5. hurricane
6. cicada
7. peloton
8. partisan
9. sovereignty
10. defenestration



At first blush, this looks innocent enough, with its allusions to an election year and various plagues and catastrophes ... Yet on closer inspection, UD can't help but detect an occult meaning lying within this seemingly random list.

UD is about as far from being a conspiracy theorist as you can get, but the more she considers these ten most-requested words, and the more she asks herself who might have requested them, the more persuaded she becomes that they intend to convey a message.

The message clearly involves a blog, and an "insurgent" one at that. Connect the words sequentially into blank verse and see what happens:



Upon each blog it is incumbent
To appeal to the electoral whims
Of readers. When one little blog becomes insurgent
It hits the big guys like a hurricane,
Like a sudden cicada swarm.
Defensively, they form a peloton of partisans
To assert their sovereignty.
I don't know what to do with "defenestration."