blogger and blogess

[Alice Faber]

william salmon wrote:
> This whole item seems quite suspect to me. I read a fair number of blogs
> written and maintained by women. These range from highly political blogs
> with a high degree of concern for feminist issues to apolitical knitting
> and craft blogs. I can't imagine any of the women maintaining these
> blogs referring to herself as anything but a blogger, even with ironic
> scare quotes.
>
> [ws]
> Well, like I mentioned before, 'blogess' is nowhere near as common as
> 'blogger', but it certainly is present.
>
> There are 19,500 raw Google hits for 'blogess'. (Interestingly, there are
> 705 raw hits for 'bloggeress'.)

Bloggeress is, at least, more euphonious.
>
> Anyway, here are few sites that demonstrate what I was referring to:
>
> A site entitled: "Blogess: blog for writing women course".
> http://kriswhittaker.blogspot.com/
>
> Author Stephanie Klein's myspace page:
> http://www.myspace.com/blogess

That may be her title, but in the profile in her sidebar, she describes
herself as a "blogger".
>
> And a directly relevant blogess:
> http://ramoy.jeeran.com/archive/2006/4/43175.html
>

Glancing at this latter shows (a) she's coining and attempting to
propagate the term and (b) not a native speaker of English. One of the
comments on this post uses "bloggeress". Another comment suggests the
morphologically Arabic "blagarah".

--
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Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                           tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                        fax (203) 865-8963

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