a blogging lexicon

There are several key words you must employ if you wish to eviscerate your opponents. ("Eviscerate" is one of them.) The following lexicon is for your perusal, enjoyment, and use. Think of it as the pepper in your blogging stew, or as the glint on your razor-sharp logic, or the ______ of your ___________ ___________. (Fill in your own metaphor.) Clichés are included so you may avoid them like... the... pestilence.

By the way, it's a work in progress, and suggestions are welcome. If you know of any other Ambrose Bierces in the blogsmos, post your link as a comment.

(For a much more serious dictionary of blogging, see The Blogging Glossary.)



Blather (verb). See: bloviate.

Blogger (noun). An expert on any given topic.

Bloviate (verb). To opine ad nauseam, ad libitem. To go on past courtesy, custom, reason, and necessity. To filibuster through a kazoo. To pontificate liberally. To fill the least possible space with the most possible verbiage. He bloviated for six hours about the political significance of the Peloponnesian inchworm.

Bromide (noun). A vacuous truism.

Demagoguery (noun). Brazen appeals to the passions and prejudices of the mob; the raison d'être of the blogosphere.

Derision (noun). Jeering attention, better than none at all. See: Scorn.

Dilettante (noun). See: blogger.

Egregious (adjective). Outlandishly bad. Axis-of-evil bad. Really, really bad.

Eviscerate (verb). To disembowel an argument with surgical precision.

Fisk (verb). To refute line-by-line, often with the gusto and accuracy of a child batting a piñata. Noun: Fisking.

Half-baked (cliché). Overdone.

Hoist on one's own petard (Shakespearean cliché). Auto-fragged.

Hypocrisy (noun). The price of admission into politics; the lowest common denominator of humanity; the first refuge of a bigot.

Looney-tunes (adjective). Overwhelmed by joie de sottise.

Luddite (proper noun). One who musters every sort of technology to rail against technology.

Maroon (noun). See: Moron.

Moron (noun). See: Maroon.

Objectivity (noun). Superiority of hindsight.

Puncture (verb). See: Skewer.

Rail against (cliché). To angrily bloviate.

Sarcasm (noun). An endearing mode of discourse obvious to the writer but invisible to the reader. Sarcastic.

Satire (noun). All God's truth. Satirize, Satirical.

Scorn (verb). To ridicule from a distance.

Skewer (verb). To stab through with a sharp implement of right reason.

Tinfoil hat (noun). An aluminum skull-fitting that protects the wearer from good sense. Also, the wearer of such. See also: wingnut.

Truism (noun). Like truth the same way Communism is like communes.

Utterly devoid of fact (cliché). Reasonable.

Vacuous (adjective). Promised by a politician.

Wanker (noun). One gone blind from the obvious.

Wingnut (noun). A liberal to a conservative, a conservative to a liberal, a moderate to either, or all to a libertarian. Wingnuttery, wingnuttish.