You should love more than you hate, since this world’s filled with far more good than evil. That said, I hate few things, but one is this word “blog.”

Oh, I get how it came about. People started creating new pages on a website back in the late eighties (post-Usenet) to create a log of events and thoughts on the web – a web log or “blog” according to Jorn Bargner. “Web log” sounds cool enough to me, even adventuresome.

The hickification of that word into “blog,” however, sounds exactly like my beautiful bride sounded our first week of marriage. I’ve never seen a beautiful woman so sick, before or since. The poor girl was blog-ing into every trashcan in the house. Kept apologizing for throwing up. Yes, she got better — I make a better writer than nurse, but I can soak a rag and wield a mighty thermometer in a pinch.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking about the word esemplastic. Coleridge formed the word irregularly when he was trying to show what poets did every time they take two unconnected concrete images and smash them together into a new metaphor of being. The images literally “mold into one” and create a new unified idea. An esemplastic idea. It’s a wonderful word and describes the poetry moment beautifully.

Unfortunately, so does “blog” for most “bloggers.” If someone’s complaining, an easy derogatory retort is “don’t like it, then go blog about it.” Blog has become synonymous with vomitous whining online.

But not all blogs work that way…

For years, I’ve followed Yewknee for everything new and pretty and awesome that’s coming out. I keep up with Pioneer Woman for recipes and Patrick Rothfuss for everything nerd. A decade ago, I hung out online with Michelle Johnson of Poefusion who used to give daily poetry prompts and, in so doing, gave me an unorthodox free education in poetics. HypeMachine distills the cool of the internet music. Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency shares hilarious lit-nerd humor. And then there’s the online diary of Samuel Peppys, a diary that simply blows the part of my mind built for historical fiction. Not all blogs sound like whiny excuses for digital upchuck. Some of them work wonders through words and images and sounds.

So, amateur philologist that I am, I created some alternative words to describe internet blogs that transcend their own category of being, because we need a new class for super blogs.

Class suggestions for better-than-average blogs:

• digiturnal

• journet

• cuberbük

• virlocus

• imacord

• symbod

• synrnet

• sitery

• chronexus

• chainscript

• minmoir

• logline

• histally

If you have an opinion about these or a better suggestion than the pukey word “blog,” leave it in a comment below.