As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list–I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed–who never would be missed!
People who use the word “bandwidth” to mean “time,” as in “I’ll see if Sally has the bandwidth to handle that.”
Analog signals have bandwidth, communication channels have bandwidth . . . people don’t have bandwidth.
We’re wordsmithing a confirmation email that we send out to new members of our association.
One problem I have with it is that we talk about our mission being to “enhance the quality of nursing care” and then in the next sentence we talk about members receiving “enhanced benefits.”
Do we need to use “enhance” in every sentence? What’s the difference between “benefits” and “enhanced benefits”? Maybe we could just say “benefits” and leave it at that.
No, our customer care analyst says we really do offer “enhanced benefits” above and beyond the usual benefits, so we need a synonym for “enhance” if we don’t want to use it twice.
I’m thinking we could say “improve the quality of nursing care” or we could say “boost the quality of nursing care.”
“Improve” is clearly better but I just love the sound of the word “boost.”
They’re not booing, they’re saying “boooooooooost the quality of nursing care.”
Anyone who cannot speak clearly and simply should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so.
“Forty percent of the people at my school speak Korean,” my son says. “Or Chinese. I can’t tell the difference.”
The dizziest woman in the office just used the word “congruence” in a sentence — correctly.
Have I underestimated her?
If anyone ever told you there’s no reason to learn math in school, they are absolutely right!
Americans are so mathematically illiterate that you’re better off learning to speak Klingon if you want anyone to understand you.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve walked through a mathematical demonstration of some concept and gotten back a reply like “Well I don’t see any reason why . . .” or “Let’s have a meeting to discuss that.”
God, it’s painful.
If you’re still in school, don’t bother learning any more math than you absolutely have to. It’ll just come back to haunt you.
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list–I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed–who never would be missed!
People who say “pitcher” when they mean “picture” . . .
My son had an assignment this weekend to write an essay on cultural values vs. personal values in Huckleberry Finn.
The teacher didn’t assign the whole book, just an excerpt in which Huck has to decide whether or not to send Jim, the escaped slave, back to Miss Watson.
So I read through the excerpt and sure enough, it includes multiple uses of what’s now known as “the N-word.”
I asked the boy, “Did Mr. Murano discuss with you guys about Mark Twain’s use of the word ‘nigger’?”
“No,” he said. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, our school is mostly Asian. Now if Mark Twain had overused the word ‘chink,’ then we’d have a problem.”
One thing I forgot to mention: When I was let go from IndyMac a year ago — and in each subsequent round of layoffs shrinking the workforce from 10,000 to 7,200 — it was called a “right-sizing.”
God, I hate that word.
I noticed they finally dispensed with the bullshit last week . . . when they cut another 3,800 people from the remaining 7,200, just before failing completely, the word “right-sizing” was not used . . .
Because EppsNet is sweeping the globe like nuclear fallout, I sometimes get comments like this one, where it’s hard to tell what’s spam and what isn’t.
Often it comes down to this — if the person is a native English speaker, I think they must be putting me on. One clue is to check the IP address.
For example, the above comment was posted from Mauritius, an small island nation off the coast of Madagascar. While English is the official language and French predominates in media and business, the most widely spoken language is Mauritian Creole, considered the lingua franca, or native tongue, of the country.
Verdict: Valid comment.
A wordle made from my del.icio.us tags. Click it to enlarge . . .
Serial Entrepreneur — I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who refer to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs.” What the heck is the difference between an entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur? I suppose Bill Gates is an entrepreneur and e.e. cummings’ Uncle Sol was a serial entrepreneur — farmer, chicken farmer, skunk farmer, worm farmer.
Length — For some reason, people who talk about basketball now describe players as having “great length.” Nobody says, “He’s very tall.” They say, “He’s got great length.”
News flash: People don’t have length. They have height. They even have width. But they don’t have length — except at birth and shortly thereafter, when we measure them lying down because they can’t stand up yet.
Describing a basketball player as having “great length” is as uninformative as saying, “He’s a tall black guy with long arms.”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if boxes, etc., sitting around the office are supposed to go out with the trash. In Southern California, you’ll often see BASURA written on these things because the probability that a Spanish-speaking person will be taking out the trash is high.
We couldn’t seem to get this box removed by writing BASURA on it, so one of our tech support people came up with this sign . . .
Last weekend, we had dinner at a Chinese place with some of my in-laws. As usual, my son and I were left at one end of the table to entertain ourselves while the rest of the group chatted with each other in Thai.
Near the end of the meal, the boy started reading through the fortune cookies and ad libbing the messages: “‘If you’re reading this, you’re most likely Asian, which means your mom will yell at you a lot.’ ‘This fortune cookie is stale. You’re not going to like it.’ ‘You will fulminate in 10 seconds.’”
“Fulminate?!” I said.
“It was one of my vocabulary words.”
When the government says ‘Islamic militants,’ it sends a message to the public that Islam and militancy are synonymous.
No, that’s not correct. What law school did you go to?
If Islam and militancy were synonymous, then you could just say “Islamic” or “militants” and “Islamic militants” would be redundant, like “past history” or “unexpected surprise.”
So actually, when the government says “Islamic militants,” it sends a message that Islam and militancy are not synonymous, although you can’t help noticing that most terrorists are in fact Islamic . . .
