Kos’ Reflections on the Army & Going Donkey
In doing research for my Linguistics paper on the metaphors used to talk about blogs (wee!), I came across this really interesting article that none other than Berkeley’s own Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the Kos of Daily Kos, wrote for The American Prospect about a year and a half ago. Kos reflects on the time he spent in the army right after high school, and why he switched from being a presinct-captain Republican to a card-carrying Democrat. It struck me as incredibly poignant, especially with an election nearing, as people are evaluating their own beliefs in choosing a candidate to vote for. It’s a short article, so you should definitely check it out!
P.S. How meta is it that in the midst of writing a paper about blogs, I should be compelled to post one of my own? Oh, academia.
I’ve noticed that blog is used metonymically to refer to a blog entry (as you did in the last sentence) as well as the medium itself, much like IM can refer either to the instant messaging capability or to a message sent using that capability, or how Gmail uses chat in “X is offline and did not receive your chat.” I suppose it’s because there’s no succinct term that means ‘blog post’ or ‘blog entry’, yet the medium is salient when discussing the entry.
I wonder if anyone has looked to see if there’s as typical order to metonymic extensions of these sorts of terms. Blog came from web log, so it started as a noun referring to the medium; now it’s also a verb and a part noun. E-mail started out as the medium, and now is also a noun for an individual message. Google started as a company, then became a service/medium, then a verb. Who knows: maybe in the future “a Google” will refer to a search result. Hey, maybe Ted Stevens was simply ahead of the curve when he said “My staff tried to send me an Internet the other day”…