Friday Fun: You can’t say “sh” in Spanish
This 4-minute TED Talk explains how the lack of “sh”explains why we use the letter X to mean “the unknown.” You know like Planet X. X-ray. Gen-X. X-Men. X-rated.
Cheers!
This 4-minute TED Talk explains how the lack of “sh”explains why we use the letter X to mean “the unknown.” You know like Planet X. X-ray. Gen-X. X-Men. X-rated.
Cheers!
To Be Clear, SEC Reviewers Want Filings in Plain English, Period” from the Wall Street Journal will help you make your case. Let me highlight a few of their examples of SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) responses to the filing documents companies have submitted for review. In case these documents are unfamiliar to you, here’s how Wikipedia describes them:…
In case any of you are wondering where the phrase originated today . . .
Like to play with words? Need a diversion today? I suggest a visit to the Oxford English Fictionary. From their About page: Have you ever read a book and come across a word and said to yourself, “Hmmm, self, I wonder what that word means?”, and then gone to a dictionary to look up the…
Learn a little something about language humor at Much Reading. Wow. over at The American Scholar. Jessica Love explains the linguistic humor of the doge memes. Like the ones shown here. Happy Friday!
“Passive voice is bad,” cry self-proclaimed (but undereducated) writing experts. I’ve known lots of these folks who can’t accurately identify a passive. And very few folks who can accurately define it. And even fewer who can provide amateur writers with more useful advice than this platitude. (In fact, I can’t accurately call it a platitude since…
Doge is funny, in part, because doge’s style is odd. As in not quite human. In other words, Doge’s language calls attention to itself. One of the explanations for odd-sounding style is called selectional restriction. Because the kind of attention doge elicits is obviously undesirable in workplace writing, selectional restriction is one of the topics covered briefly…