The linguistic consequenses of reading blogs - I'm an isolated English speaker in Belgium on linguistic life support

I’ve been reading blogs. There are so many blogs out there and impossible to know where the good blogs or the blogs I would be interested in are. Still, I’ve done a couple of random searches, and a few blogs did stand out (see my links), but mainly I’ve read blogs that somehow relate to my own; my readers’ blogs, my readers’ blog’s readers’ blogs, my favorite blogs’ recommended blogs, and so on. I’ve found that the blogs I’m inclined to keep reading are the personal blogs written by people that either lead a similar life to that of mine, or a very different life however with some form of connection to me or my life.

The other day I stumbled upon this blog where Linka72 recounts her life as call-center slave. I found myself reading the one post after the other, just to find out more about her seemingly disgusting colleague "Belly" and what happened at her co-worker's FABULOUS wedding.

However interesting these lives are, in reading blogs you will end up with a lot of wording of questionable quality, not to mention useless information, however I find it sometimes acts as life support for my current English (or for my other majority language Swedish, for all that matters). Living away from the country where the majority language is spoken, I find myself linguistically isolated and my English has become obsolete and well, shabby. I can read all the Charles Dickens I want, I speak English at home; to the Husband, my boys and most of our friends, but the fact that we are stuck on this “island”, recycling our own words and, all modern technology aside, are not in the immediate loop, inhibits my linguistic development. I know; I just used the word “shabby.”

By Lovain