Throw Another Blog On The Fire

Today’s word family comes from the IE root leg1.  (The 1 means there are other leg roots that are not related to this one.)  The root leg1 means to collect.  (The -lect of collect comes from this root). Now follow this – the root also leads to the meaning of “spoken”.  Think about it.  Hopefully, when we speak or write, we bring together the words that will effectively communicate our meaning.  First example: legal.  See, over thousands of years, the root leg is still intact.  Legal matters are based on law (a collection of spoken words). Related words include lecture, legislature, elect, neglect, and select.

Continuing with the idea of words, all those school subjects like biology, geology, psychology actually mean “words about _____”.  The Greeks had the word “logos” which just means words.  It strikes me as funny that today a company develops a symbol (like MacDonald’s golden arches) so they don’t have to use words to express their company identity. What’s that called? A logo.  (Ever heard "a picture is worth a thousand words"?)

Remember the era of discovery and captain's notes we find in the ship’s log?  That kind of log is like a diary where words are collected.  But what about that good old tree log?  Trees are cut down and gathered for firewood or for building purposes. Fire logs and captains’ logs come from the same root and meaning – to collect.  Right now, you are reading my word blog – a collection of words, in this case, about words.  Where do you think blog came from?  Blog is a contraction of "web log" (a log on the internet).  It will be interesting to see where blog goes from here.

Consider that log could mean either a piece of wood, a diary of sorts, or even to “log on” to software or website.  Today, a Google search of “log” get’s 751 million hits.  Pretty impressive and that represents the far-flung uses of the word.  “Blog” is a far more limited word, really pretty peculiar.  The word "blog" is only about 12 years old (first used in 1998).  How many hits do you think it will get through a Google search for “blog”? 2.7 billion!!!  Almost four times more hits for “blog” than “log”.  [By way of comparison, the word "love" get's 1.48 billion hits on a Google search.]  Why does blog get more hits than log?  A blog is something that exists on the internet.  If you use the internet to search for an internet-related term, you’re going to get a lot (A LOT) of hits.  But if you walk through a neighborhood, you won’t see many blogs, but you’ll probably see thousands of logs patiently waiting for the fireplace.  That’s a good example of the peculiarity of words and how meanings and uses change over time and circumstance. 

Other words related to this root include logic, lesson, legend, dialect, dialogue, and legitimate.  The word privilege is also related. What is a privilege?  A word or law spoken privately, to just one or a few people.