I was going to write the short version of this as another Mastodon reply to a thread that Belghast tagged me in a little while back but I realised, hey, it’s a free blog post for day 3. Let’s crank this out and be in bed before 2AM 😉
So I did the traditional walk down memory lane for the start of the month and it seems like we landed on “Blaugust” spontaneously during our group’s first blogging festival.
The original name, if it had any, was “blogfest”, which was already corrupted by the time I made my first post of the event.
While other participants also called it “Blagofest” on day 1, UnwiseOwl, the instigator of the challenge took a much classier approach to it, dubbing us the “Augustinians”. Yes, this ties into his occasional papal blog content. Despite this seeming to be a natural term for those who take on the Blaugust challenge, I haven’t seen it widely used. Maybe we can lay claim to a little bit of original etymology there 😉
In the replies to Owl’s post, you’ll see I made a comment about the “Baubloggers”. Perhaps this was the seed that planted the next corruption into “Blaugust”, which was quickly coined on a Day 2 blog post.
By Day 8, UnwiseOwl caves to “Blagofest”, but “Blaugust” is yet to take hold. It takes another week until he concedes to “blAugust“, but it’s almost as if he still disavows it, calling it “Ale’s blAugust adventure”.
Come August 31st and September 1st, “blAugust” appears to be the victorious moniker. UnwiseOwl is the first gold star member of our group of Blaugustines – having successfully posted every day of the month. One of the blogs died an honourable death, having been set to self-delete if no new fiction was published each day. Another blog appears to have been lost to the mists of time.
Come 2012, there’s no question of what we’ll call our now-annual blogging festival. It’s canonised as Blaugust.
Despite my earlier claims on Mastodon, I found during research for this post that we certainly can’t hold any claim to the name (there are blogs still alive from 2010 and perhaps earlier that called the “Blog Every Day in August” challenge “Blaugust” rather than “BEDA”). It’s possible that we were unaware of these earlier efforts because Twitter didn’t have a great text search, and the first hashtags don’t start appearing until later years.
That said, I still believe that it was because of Twitter that we did quickly discover Belghast’s Blaugust when it began, and it’s been inspiring to see that the stewardship he’s provided has made the event one with staying power.
Alright, it’s definitely past 2am. Day 3, out!
Interesting dive into the early origins, thanks. I just wonder if everyone pronounces this the way I do in my head, LOL.
It’s certainly an interesting set of vowel sounds to try comparing pronunciations on! Here in our corner of Australia, “blog” and “August” have no resemblance to one another at all, so we formed the sounds by adding the “bl” in front of “August”. That’s also reflected in the “blAugust” rendering that UnwiseOwl used.
So, “BLOR-gust”, sorta?
I’d be interested to hear if Belghast recalls having to go through many iterations before also independently coining “Blaugust”. On the local nature of pronunciations, I’ve always kind of felt like his handle is itself only a short corruption away from “Blaugust”, so I wonder if that played any role. Perhaps he pronounces them entirely differently from what I’m thinking, though!