Jabnaas - just a blog not an authoritative source

Or, how to learn to relax and go with the jabnaas.

JABNAAS - just a blog not an authoritative source. Since shortly after its first known appearance in December 2007 it has tended to be used in all-lowercase, thus: jabnaas.

Usage:

1. To remind the reader that a blog is, after all, just a blog. Unless it makes very clear and verifiable claims to some sort of authority, it is not to be taken too seriously on such subjects as:

• Meissen porcelain
• French painting
• Bartók’s string quartets
• Satellites
• Ant and Dec
• William Harvey
• Anything at all

2. To remind the blogger of much the same thing: to wit, it will not directly and immediately cause the Thames to freeze over, and ninety-six species of butterfly to become extinct, if you leave some fact unverified or indeed unknown. In fact, it will cause not even the merest ripple in the basic rate of income tax should you get Ant's birthday or Dec's shoe size wrong, and not bother to check it, and it then stays wrong for a decade or more till someone with real OCD checks, or someone who knows happens along, or maybe Ant and/or Dec pop in to say hello and enlighten blogger and blogreader alike.

So: Jabnaas - leave it, get over it, it doesn't matter that much. (Yes Vogel, pay attention, I am talking to you dear boy.)

You see, ever since the tragic disappointment of "blognorance", I've been racking my several remaining brain cells trying to think of a witty neologism, partly as a shorthand for use in the blog, and partly (well more so really, to be honest) to try to make myself feel better over the previous debacle and the 83 gun-jumping swine (now there's an interestingly mixed metaphor) who have selfishly and irresponsibly used my word, without a care for my feelings, before, er, I thought of it.

I wanted, as I say, a witty neologism but jabnaas is what I got instead. Oh well. It'll have to do. Maybe I will grow to love it, like Brussels sprouts. I sort-of concluded that acrostic or acronym (or whatever - jabnaas!) was probably the only way to go, short of just plucking a word absolutely out of thin air, because all the cleverisms like blognorance or bloglectful had been bagsied years ago. And anyway there's only so much pleasure to be had from flogging a dead horse and this one seems pretty much all flogged out, poor old thing.

I did look at some other possibilities:

• jabasynteb
  just a blog about strawberry yoghurt not the Encyclopædia Britannica.
• jabnteb
  just a blog not the Encyclopædia Britannica
• jabnae
  just a blog not an encyclopædia
• jabnarf
  just a blog not a reference library

- and their fouler-mouthed variants (cover your ears, Tamsin):

• jabasyntefb
• jabntefb
• jabnafe
• jabnafrf

- but as you see they are all a bit rubbish (OK, quite a lot rubbish), and jabnaas, the best of a bad bunch, at least has the advantage that it is almost pronounceable, that it sounds vaguely funny, and that it might, seen in the right light, be a slightly threatening description in some English dialect of, perhaps, a medical procedure of some sort – who knows?

Anyway, for better or worse, jabnaas it now is. I intend to refer frequently to this page in the course of trying to save myself from a nervous breakdown while obsessing about how much to put in about the West Coast Main Line or (depending on definitions) which car · I · owned · first. Jabnaas.

As of right now, Googling it does not work. Hurrah, huzzah, a half-holiday and a commemorative basket for the peasant children.

Remember: jabnaas - just a blog not an authoritative source.

You know it makes sense. (Perhaps)

I know it makes sense. (Almost definitely.)

Ant and Dec - well, they probably don't care. Hah - more fools them.

Jabnaas!!