I’ve written some fairly serious essays this week. I thought I would post one of them tonight, but then I remembered that it is Saturday evening and it seemed to me that a Saturday Evening Post ought to be more on the lighthearted side. So I’m doing this one instead.
It intrigues me, for instance, that a “post” is something you put on a “log.” I referred in my first post to the crunching up that gave us, instead of web + log, just “blog.” Words are not always fussy about where you separate them. Take the process, for instance, that gave us “an uncle” from the older “a nuncle.” It isn’t so bad, though, really. If you remember that a “log” was once a chunk of wood thrown overboard to help in the navigation of a ship and that the information it provided was “posted,” so to speak, on a “log board” or “log slate,” then putting a log on a post is the most natural thing in the world.
Natural. Not necessarily simple. There are three nouns, “post,” and every one of them has a separate existence as a verb. There is posting like mailing a letter and like being stationed somewhere and like putting a sign up—-you could put it on a post, I suppose.
The folks who put together blogspot.com and who made it so easy to use (thank you, thank you) offer the user a chance to put up some permanent remarks, called “pages,” along with the occasional remarks, called “posts.” I’ve been capitalizing them as Pages and Posts to try to get used to the idea, but I think I’m over that now.
You get 10 pages; ten essays that just sit there. They don’t get pushed down into a historical sequence like posts. I can still find, for instance, the first post I wrote last May but I have to leaf through June, July, August, and September to find it. The pages just sit there at my site.
When I noticed that, it occurred to me that I would be writing about ten subjects—or somewhere in the neighborhood of ten. Shortly after that, I thought that if I had the wit to do it, I could turn each of the pages into an introduction to one of the themes. You get to say what the theme is in the box at the bottom called “label.” So each page would represent a label, like “politics” or “love and marriage.”
All I really had to do was work out what 10 things I was going to devise labels for and then write the ten essays—I mean pages. I’ve done that now. I expect I’ll keep fussing with them. I know, for instance that the page now called Christian Apprenticeship 2.0 is not what I want and that it will be replaced by a page called Christian Praxis…which also might not be what I want, but I like it better at the moment.
So I have a very broad category I call Living My Life. I thought if an idea didn’t go anywhere else, it would at least go there. And that is what I am labeling this one. There are three related to Christian thinking and acting: Christian Theology, Biblical Studies, and Christian Praxis. There are two political ones: Politics and Political Psychology. Then there are just things I like to write about, like Getting Old and Love and Marriage. Finally, there are Words, long a fascination of mine, and Books and Movies. That’s ten. Or, as a very wry friend put it, “One per commandment.”
I’m really happy to be blogging. I’m really happy you are helping me. And have a wonderful Saturday evening.
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