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 [...]
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English,
grammar,
language,
phrases,
rants
Thursday December 4, 2008
For some reason that makes little sense, Apple decided to not include one of the words I use most frequently in the iPhone’s internal dictionary. So if I ever send you a text message saying that something is, “ducking awesome,” or that you need to, “get the duck out,” that is why. A [...]
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Apple,
dictionary,
iPhone,
language,
Mac,
words
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?
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English,
grammar,
language,
rants,
speech,
words
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
Tagged as:
English,
language,
lists,
words
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.
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English,
homosexuality,
language,
News,
pronunciation,
radio,
speech
A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else [...]
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code,
language,
linguistics,
plugins,
Programming,
SEO,
wordpress,
WP
Thursday February 15, 2007
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 [...]
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adverbs,
English,
grammar,
language,
rants,
speech
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. [...]
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cell phone,
digital cameras,
disclaimers,
English,
language
I think I’m going to have to add some of these to my email sig. Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam! Because, you know, interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europe vincendarum.
Tagged as:
language,
Latin
These are from a joke email circulating that purports to be “ANALOGIES & METAPHORS FOUND IN HIGH SCHOOL ESSAYS”. I highly doubt that these were actually culled from high school essays. The main reason I don’t believe it is because there is no point of reference. There is no notation or source. [...]
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comedy,
Engish,
language,
writing