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Are you a maven of the blogosphere?

New technical terms are a source of great irritation to the casual reader. They are a way of creating an exclusive club of those ‘in the know’, what George Bernard Shaw called a ‘conspiracy against the public’. Nonetheless, new processes and ideas create the need for a new vocabulary to describe them.

Most online linguistic innovation originates in the USA  – the epicentre of web production and consumption. As a result new words and phrases tend to draw on American cultural references. The three main sources are: politics, academia and sport.

Some of these terms – like blogosphere in the title of this post – are pretty self-explanatory. Others are mystifying. Do you know what a maven is? Or a meme? When something is inside the Beltway? Or inside baseball?

Answers here

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