Friday, July 15, 2005

Philogrammateus

Scott Gosnell has a very nice post about kinds of "friendship" that get struck up between people on the blogosphere, regardless of whether those people have met. He kindly mentions me, and writes:

"I’d really like to meet Dr. Nokes after having a stimulating discussion with him today here at The View (it started at his site). In a rather distant way, I now consider Dr. Stokes [sic] a friend, or at least an acquaintance, though we’ve never met. I suppose after exchanging meaningful conversation, opinions, viewpoints, whatever, you just can’t call someone a stranger any more. I know next to nothing about Pennywit, yet he can’t possibly be a stranger after the discussions we’ve had. Do we have a word for this type of relationship?"

I don't think we have such a word, so if I could coin a neologism, might I suggest "philogrammateus," a conflation of "brotherly love" and "scribe" in Greek? Of course, using the full word in common parlance would be challenging, particularly considering that the plural would be "philogrammateis."

I suggest, then, truncating it to "philogram" and "philograms." I too, consider Mr. Gosnell a philogram, and would love to meet him.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:25 AM

    Dr NOKES:

    Sorry about the "Stokes" thing -- as you can tell from the previous sentence, I obviously know better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I figure it was just a contraction of "Scott" and "Nokes"

    And we need to have a Bloggers BBQ or something.

    ReplyDelete