Friday, January 17, 2014

Origin of the Term "Econoblogosphere": An Egomaniacal Post

Oh, I cannot resist.  I am going to claim to be the original neologizer of the now widely used term, "econoblogosphere."  Miles Kimball has just posted a video on its .future , which has also been linked to by the intrepid Mark Thoma on his links for 01-17-2014.  I have also seen it increasingly used by, well, lots of widely read people, including Paul Krugman and many others.  So, I am going to lay out my claim to be the first to coin the term and use it in, well, the eonoblogosphere, indeed anywhere in cyberspace or any other space, :-).

I did so in my very first post on this blog, back on September 2, 2007, not in the title, but in the body of the message, when I introduced myself to readers of this blog.  It appears on line 5 of the second paragraph.  I cannot say for sure that it is the first such usage, however, I know that when I used it there, I had not seen it before and consciously made it up.  Now, I have done some checking, inspired by this missive by Miles, googling all sorts of combinations, names, years, dates, this and that, and it appears that shortly after my post on September 2, others started using it later that month, Andrew Samwick on Sept. 22 and Felix Salmon on Sept. 29, being the first two I could find, but none others prior to them.

I am not going to claim that they got it from me, although this is not out of the question as Tyler Cowen had posted about me posting at Econospeak just before my first post on his Marginal Revolution, so maybe they checked it out and got it from there.  However, more likely is that at least one if not both of them thought it up on their own.  The term "econobloggers" had been floating around for months, so it was an obvious neologism to make.  This is probably one of those cases of near simultaneous independent invention that often happens, such as with Newton and Leibniz for the calculus (obviously a much less important issue than this one, :-))., but I am going to stake my ground here and now as probably being the first to have done so, until someone proves otherwise, :-).

Barkley Rosser

Added and see first comment:  Have since found earlier use on November 13, 2006 by Mark Newmark of Newmark's door discussing the ranking of eocnomics blogs by Gongol.  Sic transit gloria, :-).

1 comment:

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Darn! I found an earlier usage. Mark Newmark of Newmark's Door used it on November 13, 2006 in discussing Gongol's rankings of blogs. Also, Salmon's use was on Sept. 24, 2007, still after mine.

In any case, I had not seen Newmark's use before I coined it, so innocent, but sic transit gloria, :-).