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“Refridgerators”, “pidgeons”, “burried”, and The French Band. July 17, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Cinema, Design, Earworms, Laughing, Pretty!, Spellcheck, The Ether, Videorama.
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Firstly…

Read (v.)>> Good luck selling that “refridgerator”

A brilliant (and very astute) rant from Verbal Remedy (“The She-Lord Of Perpetual Nattering”) on her Open Salon blog Verbs and Spices (once upon a snark) about the relationship between spelling and selling.*


Reminds me of something I once posted about back in the day: Good luck finding that “pidgeon”.


And also, of something I haven’t posted about, but  keep meaning to:


I can forgive a typo like this. I kind of like the idea of one Mike Mills being too “burried” in romantic sentiment to spell it correctly… And yes, it’s mainly because, as I just discovered, HE DID THE COVER ARTWORK FOR ALL THOSE INCREDIBLE ‘AIR’ ALBUMS!

My gosh, how I adored (and still do adore) this album and its cover art:

In fact, I wholeheartedly believe we should all listen to it now, and “burry” ourselves in romantic sentiment. So very Virgin Suicides.


* Brilliant name, by the by.

Love thine Word Nerd April 18, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Grammar Attack, Laughing, Punctuation, Spellcheck, The Ether, The News, Words.
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Richard Glover’s column, Revenge of the Word Nerds, in today’s Sydney Morning Herald (Spectrum section):

The language police have no interest in the content of what is being said; they don’t even have much interest in language itself, in all its slippery, transgressive glory. They just lie in wait, like cats before a mouse hole, waiting for an error to occur.

Then they pounce. And there is much delight in the pouncing…

Full article at  smh.com.au (because nobody actually buys the hulking Saturday paper nowadays).

Thank Gaia I know that Mr. Glover’s ire is all in good humour (he’s a very good-humoured sort of bloke). Of course everyone knows that Grammar Nazis never mean to offend, much less condescend. Sports fans will correct you for saying “points” instead of “goals”(or vice versa). Fashionistas love to commentate when people-watching. A tea lover will happily waffle on forever about Buddha’s Tears (if you let them). And likewise, we linguiphiles just can’t help ourselves when faced with something within our very trivial sphere of interest.


SO PLEASE REMEMBER TO KINDLY INDULGE YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD WORD NERD: She’s not pouncing, she’s just enjoying the small pleasures in a pedantic life.


(And besides, without a keen editor, every newspaper, magazine, book, journal, and other miscellaneous printed reading matter would have met that great pulp-mill in the sky long ago, condemned to death by the dire lack of media’s two most essential requirements: credibility and readability.)

RELATED POSTS: Being a Snark (and some shameless self-promotion)

Vegetarian develops insatiable addiction to Savage Chickens April 9, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Blogging, Etcetera, Grammar Attack, Laughing, Punctuation, The Ether.
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A flow chart of my relationship with Savage Chickens:

Discovery: “Oh cool. I like Post-its. I like Pythonesque, punilicious quips about Hot Yoga/The Slim Reaper. I like tofu.”

Dabbling: “I’m not going to be able to stop until I’ve seen the entire back archives, am I?”

Addiction: “Just one more…”

Obsession: “Sure I’ll eat/sleep/study/work/listen to my lecturer… after I’ve finished trawling the archives.”

Closure: (days later) “Done!… More please?”

Subscription: “DING! You have ONE new Savage Chickens email.”

Twitter: *Tweetdeck ‘new tweet’ chirp*


More blog-appropriate proof (v.) that these Post-it-icisms are truly brilliant:

“Stop spam. Read books” March 9, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Blogging, Etcetera, Pretty!, Spellcheck, Technobabble, The Ether, Wisdom.
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I used to get frustrated with those popup boxes that make you decipher undecipherable text for no apparent reason. And then I learned that there IS an apparent reason.

I mean, initially it was just about making sure that the typist was in fact a person, and not just a spam bot. Hence the name Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart*.  Bots, it seems, are great at bringing the internet to its knees, but aren’t so talented when it comes to reading distorted text.

These days, however, most websites use reCAPTCHA, and its intentions are infinitely more honourable: stopping spam AND ‘reading’ books. Now, I’m all for the simple eradication of spam, but helping to archive the annals of English literary history seems like more of a lasting service to humanity…

See, all over the world, Very Delicate, Old, and Ephemeral Books are being digitised and thus preserved for all eternity (thereby avoiding the risk of another Alexandria?). But this involves scanning said books, and then transposing the images into workable text. And if you’ve ever used “Optical Character Recognition” to edit scanned text in Adobe Acrobat, you’d know how successful THAT can be. Lowercase ‘r’ next to ‘n’ ALWAYS comes out as ‘m’.


When you fill out a reCAPTCHA prompt, one of those words is from one of those old texts, garbled by OCR (because OCR is a computer and can’t tell the difference between ‘rn’ and ‘m’, and presumably you know better).

The other is a known variable: a chosen word, mangled in the same way as the ‘unknown’ word. If you’re capable of deciphering this word, then reCPATCHA assume you’ve correctly translated the word they actually need.

So next time you’re asked to verify a posted link on fakebook, stop before you grumble, and remember that

  1. You’re doing a noble and relatively effortless deed, to help a noble and otherwise unconquerable cause, and
  2. This is perhaps the only time that as a human, you are more useful than a computer, and you should do what you can to reinforce that assumption.

Hell, I’m tempted to put every blog post behind a reCAPTCHA-protected link, just to move the whole process along**.


*I generally don’t approve of meaningless neologisms, but I’ve a soft spot for shamelessly twee acronyms.

** Don’t worry: I won’t.

A minor revision re: lolcats March 5, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Blogging, Grammar Attack, Ire, Laughing, Punctuation, Spellcheck, The Ether.
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I may have been rather heavy-handed in my universal (and well-publicised) dismissal of all things lolcat. As of now, I would like to officially revise and clarify my prior stance:

a) I still despise the term ‘lol’ (or ‘LOL’ or ‘lololol’, and so on and so forth), whether written, typed or spoken. Maybe we can still be friends if you choose to use it, but I won’t reciprocate (I prefer ‘BAHAHA‘).

and

b) I still want to fix every lolcats caption so that it has correct spelling/grammar/syntax/everything.

BUT…

c) Lolcats can be … REALLY STUPIDLY FUNNY. Especially when related to the topic of grammar/editing/linguistics/quantum physics.

Humour-wise, I place them in the same league as Man Hiding Out in IKEA by Covering Self in IKEA Bags, and this Male Model Reading The Picture of Dorian Gray From Page One Backstage At NY Fashion Week.

If your moronic, miscaptioned cat photo teeters on the brink of irony, with one lolpaw dipping into metareflexivity, then I am likely to find it snortingly funny. I will say ‘BAHAHA!’. Possibly out loud. (But I still won’t say ‘lol’).


Con-fuschias says… February 27, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Etcetera, Laughing, Spellcheck, Wisdom.
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*

No, not really. Confucius says:

A man who has committed a mistake
and doesn’t correct it
is committing another mistake.

{ via Quotes of the Day on twitter }

So contextually adapted, the Ancient Chinese wisdom is this: No blame will be apportioned to those who misspell and make typos, for it happens to us all (and some are too busy to proof, and some just don’t know ‘their’ from ‘there’). But those who recognise said error — and just leave it there to fester — are guilty of editorial negligence and ought to be ashamed of themselves.


PS. Is it terribly wrong that in my mind, ‘Confucius’ looks less like this…

{ via Pegasus News }

…and more like this?


{via news.com.au and Rolawn }

Err, yes, that’s Con[man]…fuschias.
What can I say? A rebus is a terrible thing to waste.


* Post-it photo — and the Post-it party from whence it came — courtesy of my sister.

Being a Snark (and some shameless self-promotion) February 15, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Blogging, Grammar Attack, Punctuation, School, Words.
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Word Nerds of the Web, Unite!

Why The Internet Could Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened To The English Language: Online epiphanies of an inveterate grammar snarkBy Olivia McDowell.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Snarks are not alone. Hence the above article (read it all here), which I wrote last year as part of my Online Journalism course. And now my little rant has been published in No·men·cla·ture, the online fruit of that course, and I feel duty bound to spread the word: Snark is cool! So please, read on.

Haters of lolcats and lovers of grammatical perfection, you will not be disappointed.


A bit more about snark…

  • The word ’snark’ — which began life as a portmanteau (snide + remark) — now also refers to a nark (informer) with snarking tendencies: see detailed etymology here.

  • Lewis Carroll — widely credited with having invented the portmanteau during Alice’s second trip, Through The Looking Glass — also wrote the fabulous nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark.

  • It’s been said that Snark is the language of losers. Witless, angry, petulent and belittling. That it wishes it were Jon Stewart (who is just awesome, by the way), when it fact it’s more like, well, Bill O’Reilly.

  • To me, a snark is someone with a pedantic eye for detail, and a penchant for picking out minor details — right or wrong — then waffling on about them for no other reason than pure self-indulgence. A snark is cheerily particular: specific, but never angry.

  • ‘Snark’ is also another name for the Irony Mark (؟).

Home again, Home again. February 13, 2009

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Blogging, Design, Etcetera, FFFFOUND!, Obama!, Pantone, Pretty!, Punctuation, The Ether, Typography.
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Not surprisingly, the snow was too much fun. I’m hardly ashamed to say that  when it comes to trawling the intermesh and sifting out the good bits, I’d rather glide knee-deep through champagne powder, surrounded by a swift-moving miasma of snowflake-shaped snowflakes.

That said, the intermesh did spawn some pretty neat stuff while I was otherwise occupied with colder things. Which just means that I’ve come home to a fresh backlog of intricate online oddments. And lacking the time or inclination to blog at length about all of them, here is a condensed version. Condensed as in milk: sweeter and denser, and thusly suitable only for direct ingestion (NOT as a coffee additive).

  • Kumi Yamashita via Fubiz


    Profile, 1994. the number and alphabet blocks, lit from the left, cast a silhouette of a man’s profile.


    Exclamation Point, 1995. (A shadowy interrobang).


  • Yes We Kern.


    { by Stefano Joker Lionetti on Behance Network }


    And yes, I spent January 20 in a frenzy of Inauguration Watching. That is to say, a frenzy of lying on the sofa watching CNN (falling in love with Anderson Cooper and laughing at the doom-and-gloom on FOX), eating Reece’s Pieces, drinking Krug champagne, cooing over the new first family, and generally celebrating the momentousness of the occasion, the American-ness of the day, and the luck of my being in such (relatively) close proximity to it all.


  • The Cardboard Kitchen on The Trendy Girl:

    As if I needed another reason to crave stationery supplies.

  • Alphabird by Marcus Fisher, the dust breeder.



    (It’s a black capped chickadee)


  • To Do: Post-it notes left to their fate in public places.



    (
    This one was affixed to the window of a DVD store).

    I really enjoy post-it notes. And I wish someone would litter my daily path with meaningfully-placed memos.



  • PANTONE® T-Shirts from Gap { via lintcoat and notcot }.

    And we all know how much I like PANTONE® stuff.



  • We also know how much I like paperclips:

    { Destination Seoul: Fairytale Bookmark Set by Jin Sun Suh at the MoMA store }


  • I confess, I really like this Christoph Niemann manifesto:
    (Click thru for less squinting/more detail).

    … but nowhere near as much as I love (and identify with) Mr Niemann’s observations on coffee


    (click thru for more, including a very astute graph on coffee preference/bagel fancying).

    …and his incredibly witty retelling of New York, in lego:

    You don’t need to have been to NY to love (lego) this. I haven’t, and I do. Thanks ultimately to FFFFOUND! for directing me towards this. I suggest you immediately RSS Niemann’s Abstract City blog for the NY Times. It’s awesome.


  • Save your page.

    Print your own ‘Save’ bookmark by icoeye { via Inspire me, now! }. Go ahead, it’s free! And look, it’s being demonstrated in a book of Magritte prints! Doubly wonderful.

  • And… February 6 was Semicolon Day in Sweden.


    { via Below The Clouds }

    Pause for celebration?

Helmer (n.)? December 21, 2008

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Cinema, Democracy, Grammar Attack, Ire, Spellcheck, Words.
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In my mind, ‘helm‘ is a noun: most basically, the steering wheel of a ship. Hence, to take the helm. The person who does so is “at the helm”, and is called a helmsman (or helmsperson, blah blah blah). This applies literally, when talking about ships (avast!), and also idiomatically, with regard to controlling the direction of something tangible (like a car) or abstract (like a strategy).

But then I saw this:


Apparently the person at the helm is not a helmsman/person, but a helmer. A HELMER? Helmer: Noun. No, really? Considering that this was the Greater Union cinema timetable, I was willing to accept it as a grammatical anomaly unless a reliable second opinion could prove otherwise, so I turned to the most reliable second opinion in existence: the OED. And I was shocked:

Apparently, helmer IS a noun, and a specific one at that: a person who directs a film (etc). But note also, that it is only colloquial, and only in the United States, and the first recorded appearance was only 1974 (to me, half a century at the very least is a good indicator of a well-entrenched word) AND it’s still only a draft entry.

So I say ‘helmer’ is a dumb, made-up, superfluous word. Who says ‘helmer’ anyway? No-one. Because there is no need to.

A movie director is a movie director:


{ Tim Burton via OvationTV }

And a person at the helm can just be called a helmsman/person… er, or a Captain…


{ Captain Jack Sparrow via imdb }

‘Nuff said*, at least on my part.



NB. No honestly, I was inspired by the terribly worded movie timetable. The Tim Burton/Johnny Depp joint appearance came later, and as a complete fluke, which I can attribute partly to coincidence, and partly to a penchant for my favourite director and his favourite leading man.


* Not surprisingly, the phrase ’nuff said’ originated not with Stan Lee, nor with Frank ‘Nuff Said’ Catton in Ocean’s Thirteen, but on the stage of a 19th-century theatre. See true/interesting etymology about halfway down this article.

Not hating webbreviations? November 26, 2008

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, FFFFOUND!, Ire, Laughing, Spellcheck, The Ether, Words.
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Art, Words, Spellcheck, The Ether,

Actually, I think this is Very Funny!

{ Roadside Scholar via FFFFOUND! }


EDIT: On my radar, the very next day… :

Eyechart note card - Ohkayk
{ Ohkayk via Roadside Scholar }

I spy with my little eye, something beginning with coincidence/conspiracy.



First published at tumblr Proof (v.)