Are Bloggers Defined as Unhealthy?

On Thursday, Laughing Squid reported that the dictionary on Apple’s Tiger operating system defines a blog as a pursuit of twenty-somethings with “an unhealthy interest in computers.” The author later modified the report to say that the definition actually came from the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd edition, which Apple uses.

I do not have a copy of the new edition of the dictionary, but I found that the ResourceShelf posted a complete list of the new words and definitions. Looking at the entry for blog, it appears to me that the slight to bloggers is not in a definition, but in an example showing word usage. When the italics are lost, as they are in some of the postings of this dictionary entry, it is not clear that the OAD was just showing how to use the word.

So, OAD did not actually define us as unhealthy. The definition writer was probably trying to be funny, much as I tried in junior high school when writing sentences using vocabulary words.

By the way, I can only wish I were twenty-something.