Archive for September, 2007

You’d think that some things are just common sense and don’t require legislating. But, of course, there are a lot of people out there that seem to have had their common sense surgically removed. It must have been removed, because even a fly seems to be born with more common sense than some of...
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Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald today, the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is doing away with hyphens. The dictionary claims that “People are not confident about using hyphens any more”. As if that’s a reason to do away with them. It’s all a bit 1984 double plus bad if you...
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We often consider net speak and associated abbreviations found in text messaging and the like to be relatively recent phenomena. But it is worth remembering that computers have been used to communicate since long before Al Gore invented the internet in 1995. Or was it Dan Quayle in 1943? I forget. Anyway, emoticons are...
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People do have a habit of personifying things. Since the old days of the Navy, we’ve always referred to our vehicles by name and gender. Ships were always female and to this day a lot of cars and bikes are similarly considered female. A lot of motorcyclists will refer to their bike as a...
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Yes, folks. It’s true. Fred Haley says so. Every once in a while you come across something truly bizarre that simply stops you in your tracks. With the internet a regular part of daily life, these track-stopping discoveries are more common than ever before. It happened today. I was minding my own business, searching...
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I went along to this seminar yesterday, all about sustainable investing. It’s a long, boring story that explains how I got there, but suffice to say that my wife and I were invited along and we didn’t have to pay for it. If we did have to pay, we wouldn’t have gone; these things...
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By BRUCE SMITH, Associated Press Writer Mon Sep 17 CHARLESTON, S.C. – Author Robert Jordan, whose “Wheel of Time” series of fantasy novels sold millions of copies, died Sunday of a rare blood disease. He was 58. Jordan, whose real name was James Oliver Rigney Jr., was born and lived in this southern city...
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I’ve added a little widget to the right hand sidebar. It’s a random Quote of the Day generator from The Free Dictionary website. I can’t quite configure the size exactly at the moment, but I’ll fix that sometime soon. I have no idea what sort of quotes it will spit out, but decided that...
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If you remember a few days ago I made a post about writers submitting their work to fiction publications in the form of short stories to help to get themselves noticed. This is the original post I’m talking about. Well, what do you know. One of those fine publications has just accepted one of...
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In the same way that words fascinate me, language itself is a constant wonder to me. I love the fact that people around the world communicate in such a variety of ways. I think learning another language is something that everyone should do to help them understand language in general and to give them...
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