"In the midst of posts about their cats"

"These days, many bloggers seem to say "terrorism," "Islamo-fascism," and "Jihadism" three times a minute, in the midst of posts about their cats," writes Amardeep of No False Medicine, a blog we discovered in our Site Meter stats this morning. As you can imagine, we both hoped for and feared that NFM's cat reference would link to our own blog. As it turned out, Amardeep linked to this recent post, one of our own personal favorites. A rush of dopamine as we analyzed our reaction:

"Hoped for" because of the importance of being noticed -- as long as they spell our name correctly. That's such a huge part of blogging.

"Feared" because so often these folk who reference you on their blogs are simply using you as a prop in their own fantasies, never stopping to smell the roses of what you really are. Not that we mind. That, too, is such a huge part of blogging: using others' posts as the raw material for one's own cogitations.

According to his bio, Amardeep teaches British modernism, postcolonial literature and theory, and poststructuralism at Lehigh. But of course. It was only the other day that another poststructuralist, the proprietor of a blog called Chun the Unavoidable, mistook his wife for a hat, or something equally disconnected from everyday reality. He mistook ourselves for "a genuine working-class Bush supporter." Grist for our mill, we blogged about it here and here. Daniel W. Drezner noticed and blogged about it too, bringing us the unanticipated joy of a Dreznerlanche.

Amardeep would term all of the above deixis:

A tricky rhetorical term indicating reference to the context of a spoken utterance . . . In the blog world, it refers to comments about the blogger's own blogging. It is a less judgmental word, perhaps, than "navel-gazing". Deixis is an instance of self-referentiality; navel-gazing, perhaps, is doing it either gratuitously or too often.

We'll blog to that!