Blogging Epithets

While Austingate has triggered an avalanche of postings relating to the whole need for a proper way to give citations to stuff that you flagrantly rip off other sites, what it hasn't done is address the real and growing need for developing our own language of blog epithets---how to properly swear at a fellow blogger in a way to specifically and intentionally impugn the quality, originality, and relavance of their blogging.

INDC Bill has a nice way that he's used many times to me via email: "Dude, that is so Blogger(TM)", with "Blogger" used as a euphamism for something lame, trite, boring, stupid, and yet at the same time non-functional and hopelessly bourgoisie. I hate how often Bill calls me "tres bourgeois" but that's a different rant.

Sadie floats a new one: "Damn you, and your little blog as well!"

I like that because it rolls a couple of strands together: you've got the standard exclamation about you and your four-legged form of transportation, melded together with a little Wicked Witch of the West-esque taunting (how differently that movie would have turned out had they not hired Edward Said as script consultant. Sigh)

I'd like to float a new one myself: the new hip blogging swear word needs to be "Cousin Oliver."

This curse combines the best of both worlds: the taunt that the blog has officially jumped the shark into the realm of hopeless and irretrievable lameness by citing the memory of "Cousin Oliver" Brady (the John Denver mini-me who entered the last season of the Brady Bunch like a tapeworm and heretefore is a sign of societal collapse worthy of further study by Jared Diamond); combined with insinuating that you have become a talentless hack and stooge a la Oliver Willis.

YIPS! from Robbo. I just have one small, pedantic point that's always bothered me. Surely it ought to be "Like Kryptonite to Stupidity".