The History of Blog

Hard to argue with this:

Since web logs constituted a kind of ‘information upchucking,’ Merholz recalls telling a friend at the time, why not give them a name that was ‘roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting.’

More about new words (Thomas Jefferson apparently coined 110 of them, including “pedicure”; also, the word “gobbledygoo,” before it became “gobbledygook,” used to mean “blowjobs”) at the American Scholar.