bleg

English

WOTD – 20 November 2012    

Etymology 1

Unknown.

Noun

bleg (plural blegs)

1. (Northeast England) A pouting (Trisopterus luscus).
   • 2007, Jack Melton, "Fresh water gives shore anglers a clear problem", Sunderland Echo, 4 July 2007:

     Steve Thompson, on the Moonshadow, won last Wednesday’s WBA boat competition with the only fish of the night, a 1lb 8oz pouting (bleg)

   • 2007, "Sea Angling latest", Sunderland Echo, 7 November 2007:

     Boats are taking ling to 18lb as well as codling to 5lbs and loads of pout whiting (blegs) on squid.

   • 2008, "Sea Angling: Wear in doldrums, Tyne and Tees looking up", Sunderland Echo, 29 May 2008:

     The only report on boat fishing last week was on Tuesday when the Wanderer managed to get out and took about a dozen codling to three pounds plus a few blegs.

   • 2009, "Fishing: Pier marks look favourite for Big Open", Sunderland Echo, 10 December 2010:

     Saturday saw just three Seahan SAC juniors fishing for the J.T. Jacobs Cup, with two weighing in three coalies, a codling and a bleg.

Etymology 2

Blend of blog and beg. Anglo-American writer John Derbyshire claims to have coined this word in 2002, although earlier usage may have occurred.

Noun

bleg (plural blegs)

1. (Internet slang) An entry on a blog requesting information or contributions.

   I posted a bleg in the hope of learning more about local tourism.

   • 2008, Andrew Sullivan, "The Utter Arrogance Of It", The Atlantic, 29 August 2008:

     Here's a bleg: can anyone direct me to any statement she [Sarah Palin] has ever made about foreign policy?

   • 2010, James Wolcott, "A Grammer of Motives*", Vanity Fair, 9 September 2010:

     Last time I looked, The QOR Club was a shuttered ghost town, and Jeff Goldstein is still doing monthly blegs to pay for the capital letters required to proclaim OUTLAW! at the end of his sporadic posts.

   • 2012, Elizabeth Kantor, The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, Regnery Publishing, Inc. (2012), ISBN 9781596987845, page 267 (acknowledgments section):

     This book was crowdsourced among many friends, who helped me to new insights about love in the twenty-first century and into Jane Austen; answered frantic Facebook blegs for sources of quotations I couldn't find; […]

Verb

bleg (third-person singular simple present blegs, present participle blegging, simple past and past participle blegged)

1. (Internet slang) To create an entry on a blog requesting information or contributions.

   That guy will bleg on the most unusual topics.

   • 2008, "Strange looks and funny lines from the past week", Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 18 May 2008:

     The Freakonomics blog posted a "bleg" from "Yale Book of Quotations" editor Fred Shapiro, in which Shapiro blegged for modern proverbs.

   • 2009, John J. Miller, "Novels of the Right, cont.", National Review Online, 30 November 2009:

     About ten days ago, I blegged for comments about great conservative novels — NRO readers now have posted more than 200 entries here [hyperlink redacted].

   • 2009, Curtis Brainard, "It’s Tanking; I’m Teaching…", Columbia Journalism Review, 7 August 2009:

     Zimmer had "blegged" (that’s right, begged on his blog) his readers to help him compile a number of book and article titles for inclusion in that list, and they "did not disappoint."

   • 2010, Iain Murray, "Chicagoan Voting System!", National Review Online, 15 April 2010:

     Yesterday, I shamelessly blegged people to vote for my son in a Parents magazine cutest kid contest.

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Danish

Etymology

From Old Norse bleikr, from Proto-Germanic *blaikaz. Related to blege.

Adjective

bleg (neuter blegt, definite and pural blege, comparative blegere, superlative blegest)

1. pale, pallid

Verb

bleg

1. imperative of blege

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Romanian

Etymology

Possibly from a derivative of Common Slavic blagŭ "good" (cf. Serbo-Croatian blag), or Serbo-Croatian blek.

Adjective

bleg ^{3 nom/acc forms}

1. soft, shy, silly, dull, weak, foolish, sheepish
2. (of ears, usually animals) going down, droopy

Declension

declension of bleg

		singular			plural
		masculine	neuter	feminine	masculine	neuter	feminine
nominative/ accusative	indefinite	bleg		bleagă	blegi	blegi
	definite	blegul		bleaga	blegii	blegile
genitive/ dative	indefinite	bleg		blegi	blegi	blegi
	definite	blegului		blegii	blegilor	blegilor