Logs, Blogs, and Chunks of Wood

A log is something you chop from a felled tree and maybe stick in a fireplace or use for construction. It is also anything shaped like said wooden object: a piece of goat cheese, for instance. A log is also a place where people record important information, for example on a ship and, nowadays, in the form of a weblog, aka. blog. What's the connection between these?

(An aside for the Talmud scholars among you: a log is also a Hebrew liquid measurement equal to about three quarters of a pint, but sometimes compared to the volume of various numbers of eggs. Rabbis in the Talmud debate just how many logs of wine one needs to drink to fulfill various ritual obligations, e.g. on Passover).

The origin of the tree log seems obscure. OED doesn't think it comes from Old Norse or Late Scandanavian though there are theories. It may have been more onomatopoeic, an attempt to express the notion of something heavy through sound, but this is inconclusive.

Here we move on to the ship connection. In the realm of seafaring, which I'm beginning to learn bits and pieces about as I blog (see my post on tenders), the LOG, between the 16th-18th centuries, was an apparatus made out of wood--basically a log--used for ascertaining the rate of a ship's motion. This contraption would consist of a thin quadrant of wood, loaded so as to float upright in the water, fastened to a line wound on a reel. 1574: "They hale in the logge or piece of wood again, and looke how many fadome the shippe hath gone in that time."

The pieces of information about distance and speed gleaned from repeated uses of the log would need to be recorded, usually on a LOG-SLATE or LOG-BOARD at first, and then later transcribed into the LOG-BOOK, which eventually got shortened into LOG.

Like so many other words, a term that had a very clear nautical context broadened in its meaning and came to mean any book in which key pieces of information were recorded. This broader sense seems not to have come into broad use until the 20th century, often as various kinds of manufacturers found themselves recording the details of their production. Thus, Printer's Ink Monthly, 1937: "Log, an account of every minute of broadcasting, all errors being considered. An accurate journal required by law." Or Fenelon, Economics of Road Transport, 1925: "A daily log prepared by the driver of each vehicle, showing the nature of the work performed, the tonnage carried, the time taken, etc."

Weblog seems to have premiered in the early 1990s to mean "A file storing a detailed record of requests handled (and sometimes also errors generated) by a web server." In 1997 the OED has the first instance of "weblog" meaning the more personal log of reflections that would eventually become the blog. J. Barger, in a Usenet newsgroup in 1997, posted the following: "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis," to which he assigned the URL www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html.

OED has the first use of blog as both noun and verb in 1999.

By this point, it really wasn't about trees anymore, but let's not forget that this all comes from tying logs to the back of boats.