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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:

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’).


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?

Here be Pilcrows! More punctuation plunder October 25, 2008

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Punctuation, The Ether, Typography, Words.
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While answering my interrobang queries, the wild seas of Wikipedia kindly churned up all manner of odd punctuation, glyphs and symbols, from the truly obscure to those more commonplace, though their names are not.

I have trawled through the treasure trove, and here is the booty:


Uncharted Waters

⁂ = Asterism (next sub-chapter!)

¤ = Currency (when specific currency sign unavailable. Useful!)

· = Interpunct (re: spaces, graphemes and pronunciation)

†‡ = Daggers (re: footnotes, wicket-keepers and dead people)


It’s called what now?

/ = Solidus (not “slash”)

^ = Caret (not “little up arrow above 6”)

¶ = Pilcrow or Alinea (not “paragraph sign”)

` = Prime (not “the other thing on the tilda key”)


First published at tumblr Proof (v.)

Why so obscure‽ (An open letter to The Interrobang) October 25, 2008

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Ire, Punctuation, Typography, Words.
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Interrobang

Dear Interrobang,
You ingenious exclamation mark/question mark hybrid, you,

How is it that you have hitherto been absent from my life‽
Why so obscure


Is it because you’ve only been around since 1967, the invention of (oh, the indignity) an advertising guy‽ Is it because you, like my maligned friend fora, are ‘non-standard’ and therefore thoroughly unused and uncool‽

Is it because I have to look you up in Character Map every time I want to use you‽

…Maybe you should get out more. I mean, you’re not even in the OED. If only you had made an effort to gain popular currency, we might have met sooner.

Well, now that we’ve been properly introduced, I suppose I shall make an effort to keep in touch. In times of indignation and disbelief, I shall look you up, interrobang.

Yours,
Emphatically/interrogatively,

O


First published at tumblr Proof (v.)

The Apostrophe Man strikes again! August 18, 2008

Posted by Olivia McDowell in Ire, Punctuation, The Ether, Words.
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First published at tumblr Proof (v.)

(via smartplanet.com)

Oh for goodness’ sake*, people: V’s”?!

And would that be more than one “v”; an abbreviation of versus’s or versu’s;…

image via Libertas

image via Libertas

…or something belonging to V?

Whatever happened to “vs”, or “vs.”, or even just “v”?

* This apostrophe is an important, yet oft-forgotten one. See here for more on the correct punctuation of minced oaths.