How awesome is this? Pentametron scours Twitter looking for tweets that are in iambic pentameter and then combines them into sonnets.
Posts Tagged: English
Friday Five: Favorite Adverbs
Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get your adverbs here! certainly surely simply frighteningly quickly
You Could NOT Care Less
I can’t stand when people say, “I could care less.” “I could care less,” is one of those little things that drives me absolutely batshit crazy. If you could care less, it means you care. That’s not what you mean when you say that, is it? What you mean is that you don’t care. Someone… Read more »
Whether or Not
The words or not never follow the word whether. That’s it. That’s the rule. Whether implies or not. You don’t ever need to say both of them. The words or not should never be spoken. (They should certainly never be written.) Whether implies “or not”. Get it?
Wonderful Phrases
Five Wonderful Phrases That I Resolve to Use More Frequently in Conversation soup to nuts by hook or by crook ass-over-teakettle dollars to doughnuts tits up
Gay Marriage
There was a story this morning about gay marriage on LA’s 89.3 KPCC. I was infinitely more offended by the fact that reporter Kelly Wilkinson pronounced the word “rural” as “rurl” and the word “unfamiliar” as “unfermiliar” than I was about any part of the gay rights argument.
Chinese Instructions, Part 2
I got a new insulated coffee mug a few days ago. There was a little slip of paper inside it with “instructions”. This is a coffee mug. It’s very nice and this morning it did an excellent job of keeping my coffee hot while I drove to the office. Here’s a bit of the writing… Read more »
Grammar Matters (Still)
Recently I saw a commercial for Sylvan Learning Centers. This is a company that is selling products to help your children do well in school. The ad showed a teenage girl gabbing on the telephone. The voice-over said, “Sally sure can talk fast. We can help her read fast,” or something like that. Apparently grammar… Read more »
Grammar Matters (Again)
Last night I writhed in agony while watching the 11 o’clock news. The local NBC affiliate was running a story about the Sacramento disc jockeys that were fired recently. (The radio personalities had sponsored a contest which led to the death of a woman.) Behind the anchorman the screen displayed DJ’s Fired. I’m sure that… Read more »
Chinese Instructions
After several years of mostly neglecting my Flickr account, I have finally started uploading the tons and tons of photos I’ve taken. Flickr is — if you can stomach the missing “e” — an incredibly cool site. Everything is intuitive and as far as I can tell, they haven’t done anything “wrong” anywhere. It’s everything… Read more »