Richard Flynn :: no comment

Typo Hunt Across America

Monday 28 April 2008 #

Jeff Deck is my current hero:

This March through May, we, sworn members of TEAL, will be taking a road trip around the country to stamp out as many typos as we can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language. We do not blame, nor chastise, the authors of these typos. It is natural for mistakes to occur; everybody will slip now and again. But slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed. We believe that only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.

He updates the blog daily with photos and stories of the typos and people (some friendly, some disobliging) he has encountered during that day; he tends to write in an amusing and up-beat style (he reminds me sometimes of Wodehouse’s Psmith).

View site | via The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin - The Morning News

Thursday 10 April 2008 #

Pah, whatever:

No one hears you when you say you’re sick of Paris. Sick of Paris: three words that make sense to people separately, but not in sequence. And they’re right—what am I talking about? What about champagne for sale in gas stations? And aisles dedicated to yogurt in grocery stores? And grocery stores that only sell frozen food of such high quality that, when reheated, it beats most bistro meals? And my boss and his thousand Lacoste shirts in every color? And all the gossip and insights: how French men go to pieces when they’re dumped; how Parisian girls won’t sleep with you unless you have permanent residency papers. And the white morning sunshine in Place de la Concorde, and its slow wheel of drivers, and me on my bike. And homeless men spreading out a picnic on a Metro platform.

I understand you entirely when you say you’re sick of Paris, buddy. The smells, the winter darkness, the strikes, the rudeness…

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Absurd Entries in the OED: An Introduction To Ammon Shea : OUPblog

Thursday 10 April 2008 #

I’ve been in two minds about this one since I first saw it before Easter. Ammon Shea has a book forthcoming called Reading the OED: one man, one year, 21,730 pages. In this entry on the blog of OUP USA, he makes reference to various entries in the OED which he considers to be ‘absurd’. For most (if not all) of his examples, I’m inclined to side with the University’s dictionary compilers.

Just because he doesn’t understand all the words used in the definition of a technical geological term, why should this academic publication be dumbed-down? He also seems to approach it from the point-of-view of an American (understandably), since he doesn’t understand the definition ‘Touch wood’ given for ‘Unberufen’ (which presumably is considered to have been assimilated into English at some point). Yes, perhaps it would be more helpful for an example of a syllogism to be given in English in the OED, but I’m not complaining about the given example, ‘Omne animal est substantia, omnis homo est animal, ergo omnis homo est substantia.’ (I had to look that up on the OED website, since Shea didn’t in fact quote the example in his blog-entry. In doing so, I had a thought—since every user of the OED online has to authenticate before looking anything up, are they keeping track of the words that individuals are searching for? Probably not, but I bet some of the soi-disant ‘Web-2.0’ nerds would be ardently thinking of ways to ‘monetize’ [which is a word first used in 1867] the user-data which the OUP could be collecting.) It is also slightly interesting to note that although this book is about the OED, which is being promoted in this entry on the OUP’s own blog, it isn’t going to be published by the OUP, but by Perigee, a part of the Penguin Group.

View site | via Daring Fireball

Subtraction: The Adventures of Tintin in the 21st Century

Thursday 3 April 2008 #

Khoi Vinh, whose nephew has just been introduced to Tintin:

…he became engrossed by the cast and story immediately, burying himself in the books without hesitation. Before we’d even crossed the Atlantic, he’d finished both, laughing at the comic hijinks, connecting effortlessly with the characters, and marveling at Hergés pristine, still amazing ligne claire drawing style.

Ah, Tintin, with your fantastic albeit vaguely believable storylines. You introduced me to the Manchuria Crisis (in The Blue Lotus), Italian drivers (in The Calculus Affair), and numbered Swiss bank accounts (in Flight 714 [to Sydney]).

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