Reading Writing About Writing

Alternate Title: Latin Is Dead, Alivey English!

Today on boston.com Erin McKean takes critics of the English language to task. In a nutshell: Embrace English evolution.

...if all these words look wordish, sound wordish, and act wordish, why are they all hedged about with the namby-pamby "I know it's not a real word" disclaimers? (Note: wordish is a perfectly good word.)

They shouldn't be, I agree. I make up words all the time, right here.

Like, "besotted," or "interrobang."


It's a clever little op/ed and I found the payoff right here:

Whenever I see "not a real word" used to stigmatize what is (usually) a perfectly cromulent word, I wonder why the writer felt the need to hang a big sign reading "I am not confident about my writing" on it.

-t

Overheard:

Leaving work yesterday
Woman on cell phone (whiny, contempt-y): "You probably shouldn't be there... Because it would be uncomfortable for me, it would be uncomfortable for John, and, potentially, uncomfortable for you - except, maybe not, because you 'aren't ever uncomfortable,' and you're not 'bothered by circumstance'..."

Walking home from the train
Guy outside a laundromat on his cell phone (matter-of-factly): "No, no, black. Like, priest black. With that collar thing. A little white collar..."

Bear: "Um...that's probably trouble."

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Agony Of Defeat

This should replace the pinwheeling skier on the opening credits of Wide World of Sports



Yeah. Take a good look. That used to be his elbow.

World class competition, world class hurt.
-t

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Impulse Control

If you have a problem controlling impulse spending, especially for $0.99 purchases, like songs from iTunes and Amazon's mp3 store, do not, I cannot stress this enough, DO NOT visit pandora.com and enter an artist you like.

Because Pandora will start playing other songs that you will like. And you will like them. And then you will buy them. All of them.

They even let you bookmark songs so you can easily keep track of what you haven't purchased yet.

Gah.

Clearly This Problem Has Been Resolved

Internet is down at work.

Official IT response" "We are aware of the problem and will communicate with you when the issue has been resolved. No ETA."

We can't even kill time.

-t

*UPDATE*

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To: Eblake@cashteam
Subject: Net Outage

Have you guys lost the internet? We've got intranet access but can't get to the web. I'm wondering if it's company wide or if they're finally on to me.

-t

To: tom@work
Subject: Re: Net Outage

It's just you - I can see this:

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