Columnist and language maven William Safire has a fun piece on blog jargon in the New York Times Magazine.

Apparently those rascally bloggers have pinched some of journalism’s jargon:

Some of our special vocabulary is being stolen from us by the denizens of the world of Web logs. Above the fold — the top half of a standard-size newspaper page, where the major stories begin — now, in “blargon,” is what we see on a blog’s screen before we begin to scroll down. The jump — the continuation of an article on an inside page — is now a place to which the blog’s readership is referred inside the Web site. A sidebar — which we fondly remember as a boxed, related article alongside the main newspaper article — is, to a blogger, a column down one side of the screen displaying advertisements, archived links or a list of other blogs called a blogroll. Even the reporter’s byline, that coveted assertion of journalistic authorship, has been snatched by the writers derogated as “guys in pajamas’ and changed to bye-line, an adios or similar farewell at the end of the blogger’s politely expressed opinion or angry screed. (The prevailing put-down of right-wing bloggers is wingnuts; this has recently been countered by the vilification of left-wing partisans who use the Web as moonbats, the origin of which I currently seek.)

My recollection (and, apparently, the recieved wisdom) is that “moonbat” was orignially a reference to British environmentalist and lefty journalist George Monbiot.

That’s certainly what appears in Wikipedia’s entry for “moonbat”, which also credits British libertarian blogger Perry de Havilland of Samizdata with having coined the term.

But we all know about Wikipedia’s much-vaunted accuracy. On his own blog’s glossary, de Havilland claims credit for the term but denies the Monbiot connection.