...journalism professor Michael Skube, writing in the Washington Post:
"College students nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I
have no idea why this is...
What explains [this] trend? In the limited commentary on the
question, mention has been made of the blurring of generic boundaries,
and the fuzziness of "truth" in the postmodern era--brought on by none
other than
In Cold Blood, with its well-documented fabrications. I tend
to view it more pragmatically. English has no word to denote "nonfiction
book" or "writer of nonfiction book(s)." Considering the clunkiness of
the expressions in quotation marks, it's not surprising that college
students--who are frequently called on to refer to such books and
writers, and who are famously not semantic sticklers--would have turned
to "novel" and "novelist," which come trippingly on the tongue.