Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I tend to not be as anal as some when it comes to matters of language. Just for one example, I'm not one of those people who decries the use of the word decimate as meaning "destroy a large percentage of" (as in, "Homer sure decimated that box of donuts"), on the basis that decimate's original meaning was quite specific: "to destroy one-tenth of". Language shifts and meanders, and words that mean one thing today might well mean something quite different a hundred years from now. This is one reason why readers tend to have a hard time when they first read Shakespeare, for example.

But one thing that does bug me is our insistence on abbreviating words or coming up with "shorter" versions of words, quite often for no reason other than "the coolness factor". Blog is one such word. I find the word blog inherently ugly -- for some reason, it sounds to my ears more appropriate to describe, well, something relevant to a proctological exam. Plus, it's a shortened form of Web log, which seems to me just fine and not in need of "reduction" or abbreviation. I fail to see where we gain anything by going from six letters to four, except that somehow we've consensually agreed that blog is cool whereas Web log is nerdy, I guess. I tried avoiding blog when I started Byzantium's Shores, but I've come to concede the word even though I don't like it.

So, this morning when I checked the news on MSN, I found a side-headline in their war coverage that read as follows: "World Reax".

Reax.

Now, come on. That's just goofy. It really is. It can't be because of space or line-length, because there are other headlines that are longer, with some taking up two lines. I doubt very much it would be that hard to write "World reacts" or "World reactions", depending on what's required. Now, maybe reax is some bit of military jargon that I'm simply unfamiliar with, and MSN is trying to hew to that line. But I'm not the military, and actual English is just fine for me. Let's leave the soldier-talk to the soldiers who actually have a reason to talk that way.