Pleased to Make Your Acquaintance

A few of you mentioned referring to people whom you only know via their blogs as friends. And I have to admit, I’ve done this, too. So when Miss Marisol said:

i have a challenge for you, mr. brando-licious. i, too, feel a--dare i say-- disconnect with the genpop that does not know the blogger all-stars. but, i usually hesitate to talk about this virtual clique to non-bloggers.

however, i have recently started to become less geek-shamed about discussing my blogger friends. aaannnd...i would like to have a good word that could work into the accepted lexicon and be defined as; "friend or acquaintance one has as a result of reading said person's blog or having said person read one's blog or both."

I thought of a postcard that Romy just sent to me from Lyon. I’ve never met Romy, though I certainly hope to someday, (more than likely as part of TequilaCon II, with Jen and Jill), but I feel like she is, indeed, a friend, someone whose writing intrigues and challenges me. But ‘friend’ does imply knowing someone from a real-life setting, no? So how DOES one refer to this?

I suppose the word has been around for ages: pen pal. My wife’s sister, as well as many Romanians who grew up during communism, had several pen pals, many of whom she actually met after the Iron Curtain fell. She referred to these as her friends.

But I suppose some word would be helpful, the next time I’m lucky enough to get a postcard from someone who I've yet to have been, oh as Steve Perry might say, 'Lovin, Touchin, Squeezin'. Unfortunately, I’m not the wordsmith Ms. Marisol thinks I am. In fact, as Greg from Geese Aplenty correctly pointed out on Elle’s site, I’m pretty lame.

I did look up ‘ecquaintance.com,’ and apparently this is free. So ‘ecquaintance,’ perhaps? As in, ‘An ecquaintance of mine just sent me a postcard from France.’

Or maybe a play on the word ‘pen pal’? Like ‘n-pal’? (‘n’ as in ‘Net’). Or maybe ‘post pal’?

I’d be especially hip to a foreign word, maybe something French. One of the reasons I majored in French literature in college had much less to do with the actual writing, and much more to do with the tales of drunken literary companions corresponding by letters.

Whatever it is, it absolutely, positively cannot contain the word ‘blog,’ which, by all universal accounts is perhaps the ugliest word invented in the last 2,000 years, uglier even than ‘victuals.’

I’m open to suggestions.

There will be a prize.