terminology
3 Dec 2007 04:10 pmOkay, look. There are so many words for short stories - "ficlets", "shorts"... why do you need to try to take "drabbles" too? "Drabbles" already has a meaning. It means stories that are exactly 100 words. If you've written a ficlet that's eight times that length, it isn't a drabble. If you haven't paid any attention to the length it definitely isn't a drabble, because a drabble implies a certain amount of work to make it fit the length requirement, like a haiku - a bit of planning. And hey, they're not easier than an unplanned and un-spellchecked 200-something words of commentfic - they're harder, or you're doing them wrong. Linguistic drift is all very well, but could we try to retain the specific meaning of technical terms just within the field (you know, writing, posting, and reading them?) where those distinctions are useful?