kibble and quibble

The words that David Foster Wallace circled in his copy of the American Heritage Dictionary and the interest in them remind me of the interest in Vladimir Nabokov's use of exotic, esoteric and often precise (frass, for example, which I filched in an old post).

The abuse of the word blog to refer to a post gets some attention in a Visual Thesaurus post. I've been furious about this abuse by the misinformed masses for a while and also disappointed at its growing frequency (as with a lot of abuse that succeeds in establishing itself as accepted usage). The protest seems a little too late, however, and perhaps even a futile exercise. But, as with pedantry, it shouldn't dissuade those in the right from standing by their guns.