Vatican City, the only place on Earth where Latin is an official language, has published an English/Latin dictionary to keep up with words that might not have direct translations to Latin. “Many of them [are] compounds of existing Latin words,” noted an Associated Press article from 2003. “Dishwasher is escariorum lavator and disco is orbium phonographicorum theca.”

The Vatican recently issued a third volume of the dictionary, mainly to cover words borne from the sphere of computers and other technology, and a friend and I were guessing what sort of compound monstrosity would be the word for “blog.” We were thinking it’d be something literal, maybe based on “the web” (arachnoideum) or “cheap ‘n’ nasty” (the prefix vili- or vil-), but we were over-thinking it.

According to N.S. Gill, a “Latinist” and contributor to About.com, the word for blog is ephemeris, which means daybook or diary, or more tellingly, as suggested by the English word ephemera, short-lived bits of scrapbook stuff: notes, pictures, postcards, letters, ticket stubs, programs, menus, catalogs and the like.

Gill cites a quote from Juvenal’s Satires that serves nicely as a blogger’s credo: tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes, which can be translated as, “He has a compulsion for writing.”

That’s about right, I’d say.