This is a great reminder that all of us need an editor!
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What is a linguist?
I am a linguist who studies workplace language. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain that I don’t speak lots of languages. (The fact that I wish I had learned to earlier in life is a separate issue altogether.)That definition of a linguist is used almost exclusively within government, especially in…
Friday fun with emoji
I’m a couple of days late with this nod to April Fool’s Day fun. The folks at Google Chrome helped us celebrate with this tongue-in-cheek video about emoji, which the Oxford Dictionaries say originated in the 1990s from Japanese: e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’. Believe it or not. Moby Dick has actually been translated into…
Friday fun with dirty words (your friends won’t know are dirty)
Because it’s Friday and we all need a little more fun, I’m sharing The Dirty Etymology of 9 Everyday Words by Romy Oltuski, who wrote this piece for mental_floss.** I don’t know Romy, but I share her sense of humor about word origins. Enjoy! Within our lexicon lives a library of forgotten stories, developed over…
Kudos to Google. And the Center for Plain Language.
Yesterday, Time.com reported that Google ranked #1 for their privacy policy. The Center for Plain Language judged how well 7 big tech firms followed plain-language guidelines. A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find,…
Plain language in the news
Check out Huffington Post‘s “The new illiteracy — obfuscation — hinders progress.” The author mentions some top notch plain language efforts like the Center for Plain Language and PLAIN. But he assumes obfuscation is a recent problem. I wrote a very brief history of the problem in Why hasn’t plain language become the norm? Related…
The sorry state of language education
Please tell me you had a teacher talk about homophones at least once during your educational experience. This story from the Salt Lake Tribune a few days ago depresses me on many levels. In short, an English language teacher was fired for using the word, “homophonic.” Like I’m watching a car crash . . . I haven’t been…
