Post vs Article

Sometimes when people read your writings they see things you take for granted. For example, my previous article begins "In this post ..." which prompted this discusion in #trilema:

mp_en_viaje: peterl & all : would you mind terribly if you referred to your articles, on your blogs, as articles ? it's what they are, i get it, you post them, but calling them "posts" makes about as much sense as calling cars "a drived" and girls "a fucked". you don't go about bars with a "hey, fucked! wanna do shots ?", do you ?
mp_en_viaje: it's bad grammar to begin with, what desophistication is this!
spyked: mp_en_viaje, it's "post"<->"fuck" tho, innit? so "she was a good fuck" is a closer analogy
mp_en_viaje: heh, i guess that's true huh
mp_en_viaje: i dunno, it fucking grates, on the level of wow kiddos saying "rouge" for rogue and midwesterner 15yos saying "scratch" for "itch".
spyked: tbf, I can see the argument. "article" was already there, so adding the "post" slang is somewhat similar to how romanians added the new meaning for "locatie" in the lang. what's wrong with "loc" anyway
diana_coman: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-11-05#1949532 - technically it was "a blog post"; going for correctness there, I would even question wtf is "blog" anyway, since I get it, binary log except I don't write in binary, what.
diana_coman: so yeah, it is correct to call them articles and to call the "blog" a book I suppose.
diana_coman: or what, gazette
mp_en_viaje: what's wrong with having a blog fulla articles ?
mp_en_viaje: moreover, what we do has so little in common with what the bleaters call posts... the facebook items are properly called posts. dozen-charactger gibberish.
diana_coman: yes, but "post" there for all its similarity to "to post to the blog" is just as made up, as far as I can see; a blog post, as there is a newspaper article, dunno; and in the vein of "just as much to do with what they are doing otherwise", wouldn't that hold for articles too?
diana_coman: what, those articles they write in the new yorker or the wired or what
mp_en_viaje: seems to me article's exactly what we're doing.
mp_en_viaje: nah, article is a wider word than that. "articles of incorporation" predates the newspaper / tin alley morti di fame trying to steal it.
diana_coman: ah, in that sense; yes, that would be it indeed.
diana_coman: all right, articles it is!
mp_en_viaje: was my thinking
mp_en_viaje: article (n.)
mp_en_viaje: c. 1200, "separate parts of anything written" (such as the statements in the Apostles' Creed, the clauses of a statute or contract), from Old French article (13c.), from Latin articulus "a part, a member," also "a knuckle; the article in grammar," diminutive of artus "a joint," from PIE *ar(ə)-tu-, suffixed form of root *ar- "to fit together."
mp_en_viaje: Meaning "literary composition in a journal, etc." (independent and on a specific topic, but part of a larger work) is first recorded 1712. The older sense is preserved in Articles of War "military regulations" (1716), Articles of Confederation (U.S. history), etc. Extended meaning "piece of property, material thing, commodity" (clothing, etc.) first attested 1796, originally in rogue's cant. Grammatical sense of "word used
mp_en_viaje: attributively, to limit the application of a noun to one individual or set of individuals" is from 1530s, from this sense in Latin articulus, translating Greek arthron.
mp_en_viaje: in any case, the morphological description of the articulation of thought : a pile of articles, and the web of links tieing them together.
diana_coman: yes, that would be quite it (or it should better be it).
PeterL: The way I understand, on a blog (short for web log), a post refers to any item, which could be an article. Most posts are articles, I will try to refer to them as such in the future.
PeterL: But I wouldn't call a picture of my cat an article, even if it is a blog post.1
mircea_popescu: which is the problem : you belong on facebook.
mircea_popescu: intellectually, not yet matured enough to reach past infantile superficiality into adult interesting.
mircea_popescu: becauise i both would and do call a picture of my cat an article. and in my case, it also ~is~ an article.
PeterL: mircea_popescu: that is an article that contains a picture of a cat. My point is that you could post something other than an article.
mircea_popescu: yes, and you're cordially invited to do it on facebook. you could similarily cook using something other than a stove -- such as for instance, an open pit fire. you're cordially invited to do that with your berber brethren, rather than indoors. and so on.
BingoBoingo has thought of a blog post as being like a fence post. A structural piece holding together the larger blog as a whole. The poor labeling argument however does carry more weight than my previously private metaphor.
hanbot wonders what a writ really is, after all.
BingoBoingo: hanbot: A writ seems like something determined important enough that the order was issued to have the matter written into a writ.
mircea_popescu: traditionally, the notation behind legal proceedings.
hanbot: right, but is writ:written::post:posted ? does the act of ordering scrub 'writ' of its grating-ness? or is the seemingly obvious connection between written and writ wholly imagined?
PeterL: perhaps post (something posted) is analagous to toast (something toasted)?
mircea_popescu: i think "despatch" is more in the vein of what happened there.
BingoBoingo: English isn't a consistent enough language for me to want to save the noun "post" on blogs through comparison to other English language constructions.
BingoBoingo: If it's going to be saved by comparison, I'm inclined to favor comparison to physical posts. Fence posts, mile marker posts, "woe unto he that digs into this buried gas pipe" posts, etc
hanbot: lol, it occurs to me...should mp-wp backend change to reflect post --> article?
mircea_popescu: i thought it said "publish"
mircea_popescu: but, yes.
hanbot: left column, "posts", add new, etc.
mircea_popescu: ah, yeah. indeed it should.
hanbot: cool, that oughta cement it.
diana_coman: BingoBoingo: that "physical posts" image makes me think of a sort of haphazard hut-of-a-blog, lolz
BingoBoingo: diana_coman: The process of construction rarely focuses on the aesthetics of process regardless of how much aesthetics factor into the final product.
BingoBoingo: But that is a strong objection because... when is a blog ever finished?
BingoBoingo: Anyways, articles are the future. Noun posts need actual holes dug.
lobbes: I'm sold on 'articles', tho it dun help the cause any that the mp-wp database uses the 'posts' terminology everywhere (posts table, post_id, post_content, etc.)
mircea_popescu: indeed.
mircea_popescu: whatever, now i know i want it fixed.

So I guess the consensus is that a blog is a series of articles which are published. But if you say you posted a blog post to your blog people will understand what you meant, it just doesn't sound as formal.

  1. For example, see http://peterl.xyz/2019/10/meme-of-the-day-by-raelani/ []

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