Why?

If you are a lover of words, you won’t need me to explain why this blog has been named The Blogofiles.

However, if you are reading this page by accident, welcome to The Blogofiles!

I’ve chosen this name because it has connotations and shades of meaning on several different levels:

1. It’s a blog.
2. It’s a blog for logophiles – lovers of words.
3. For those of us who used to watch the X-Files, we knew that the truth was out there. The Blogofiles will explore words, and the relationship between words and truth. This time, the truth will be in here.

This will be a blog where wordplay and witticisms work wonders. It will be a place to post interesting new words or turns of phrase.

Where else will you learn about words such as “utepils” – Norwegian for a lager drunk in the open air (literally, “outside beer”)?

Useful – and useless – words will have their moment in the sun, with one hand nursing a beer.

This photo I took of an older couple, sitting together, alone on the rain-washed and windswept upper deck of Norway’s Hurtigruten coastal ferry – albeit sans utepils (if I may use three different languages in one phrase) – conveys all that that word means. A man and woman had caught sight of the sun, and nothing – not the wind, not the threat of rain, not the biting cold temperature – was going to stop them from enjoying it. Their slightly crazy determination to catch some rays deserved memorialising.

Just as the last outdoor lager of summer in Norway is unlikely to be enjoyed in shorts and a t-shirt, neither will the last hint of warmth from the sun be experienced in particularly pleasant conditions.

My memory of Norway in late summer, fond as that memory is, does not involve warmth. Or the sun, come to think of it.

Incidentally, I don’t consider utepils to be a useless word. Nor does Gaston Dorren, who suggests in his book Lingo: A language spotter’s guide to Europe that the word be adopted into the English language to cover a practice that currently has no adequate single word to describe it. In Dorren’s own words:

“A typically Norwegian word is Utepils, a lager drunk in the open air. Beer is of the essence, sunshine isn’t.”

Why?

Why use a smaller word when an excessively large word would suffice?

Why limit oneself to words that everybody understands?

The Blogofiles won’t even attempt to answer those questions.

Typos that tell stories

We’ll have a good laugh at the trusty spelling mistake, no matter if it’s our error or someone else’s.

I am particularly on the hunt for spelling errors that tell their own unintended, accidental stories. I’ll explain more in the following post.