Definition: Relief from stress or pain through swearing. (Though, I like to think of it as 'swearing for pleasure'.) Judy's doctor told her she may get some relief from joining the Laugh Out Loud group, who regularly met for therapeutic laughter sessions. She eagerly turned up for her first LOL session, but went in the [...]
—This is an em dash. It is the width of a capital M. –This is an en dash. It is the width of a capital N. -This is a hyphen. It is the width of... er... a hyphen. The hyphen is not a dash. It's a hyphen—used to hyphenate things; intra-word punctuation, generally. It is [...]
It's true. From one evening's quasi-targeted engagement, I increased my Twitter followers by 300%. That's a big shiny number! Less shiny is the context. Followers have grown from 2 to 8. I recently read Bernard Keane and Helen Razer's most excellent book, A Short History of Stupid, where I was introduced to the term 'political [...]
I finished up my old job yesterday, and thought I'd celebrate with an espresso martini and a few too many beers. The espresso did its thing. Then I thought I'd start my Twitter campaign and go viral overnight. I may have spammed a few people. Including Bill Bailey. Sorry, Bill—and everyone else! I may have [...]
There are certain sentences that simply cannot be rephrased in passive voice. Again, I'm not talking about a vibe... It's a grammatical thing. Consider this: Active: He is going to become an editor. Try and make that passive... An editor is going to be become by him? The thing is, the subject and the object [...]
If you've ever been to a plain English or web-writing course, or read any of the 'how-tos', or the 'please-don'ts' on the subject, you would be aware, that generally, the imperative is: write in active voice!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means... Yes, indeed, language changes over time. Words that once meant one thing come to mean another, and in some cases, will completely reverse their meanings, or hold contradictory meanings.
At my local pub... Ambulant? What? For the life of me, I can't even guess what 'LH' is meant to mean... And why is the baby dancing like MC Hammer? Who signed off on this?
Today, an email passed in front of my eyes. It was sent by an Important Person to the whole of a large organisation. The tone was conversational, but with an air of gravitas. Please be aware that myself, Person X and Person Y have moved offices to... I'm sure you've seen this kind of thing [...]
Apostrophes: The punctuation mark most likely to freak out the grammatically obsessive compulsive. Some of us have learned to block out excessive exclamation marks, deal with over-earnest ellipses… come to terms with Tenuous Title Case, and cope with careless comma splices, but when someone uses an apostrophe to indicate a plural, we may twitch a [...]