A couple of weeks back, Steven at Library Stuff wondered why some librarian bloggers refer to their place of work as MPOW.
I think it's interesting how language develops in little subcultures. Bloggers are so used throwing around terms like blogs, RSS, XML, feeds etc - terms which we all know about and understand, but can be confusing and alienating to outsiders.
That said, so bloggers may have their own jargon, but does this mean that anything goes and that we'll all going to end up writing in leet (a.k.a. l337 and l33t)?
New words and terms and acronyms will always be flowing in and out of our vocabulary. I can imagine that sometimes the new words might be good and welcome, and other times, the word might appear stupid and contrived and designed to exclude outsiders (which was my initial opinion of the word "blog"). But generally there's little one individual can do to stop an annoying new word from taking - a group of individuals, that's another matter. And once the word has taken, give up on that lost battle. Focus your energy on repelling the next linguistic atrocity.
Like many of the commentors on Steven's post, I think that sometimes MPOW serves a useful purpose for people who want to blog about their work and workplace issues without naming their workplace. Why would people want to do this? The main reason would be if the blogger knows or senses that the her/his workplace would not appreciate being named.
Read the extended version of this post.
