May 2015
Word of the Day: Cenatory
Definition: Pertaining to dinner. All the official definitions of this word talk about Romans wearing cenatory garments. If you wanted to tell someone else about what Romans wore when they ate dinner, it's pronounced 'se-na-tur-e' In [...]
Word of the Day: Flabelliform
Definition: Shaped like a fan. Today, a tin of beetroot decided to leap out of my hands and make a flabelliform stain on my white dress*. I knew I hated the stuff. ** * This didn't [...]
Hypercorrection: hyphenating ‘ly’-adverb–adjective combinations
A noun is a thing, like an apple or regret. If we talk about a red apple or a great regret, both ‘red’ and ‘great’ are adjectives. So what’s an adverb?
Word of the Day: Bathos
Definition: In a literary work—an abrupt descent from the sublime or high-minded to the ridiculous. Not to be confused with 'pathos'. Pathos is a rhetorical technique that appeals to an audience's emotions—such as sympathy or sorrow. Bathos is most [...]
An accessibility issue often overlooked: Grade level readability
There’s this thing called the WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They set out all the good things you need to do to make your content accessible for people with disability, people including those with vision [...]
April 2015
Myuran & Andrew: People can change
If you live in Australia, you would have heard that Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan—twenty-something Australians convicted of trying to smuggle heroin into Indonesia 10 years ago—were executed this morning. By firing squad, after that [...]
9 reasons list blog posts (listicles) are complete crap
Caution: this post contains adjectives that are non traditional in a business writing context. To rephrase that, there is some mild moderate swearing. Oh, and I think I’ve used my entire week’s quota of ellipses. [...]
Word of the Day: Horripilation
Definition: Goosebumps; an erection of hairs on the skin due to cold, fear or excitement I experience horripilation every time I see a cockroach (alive or dead). Also, when I hear a really good song (for [...]