(Re-posted with permission from J.L. Murray) Someone once told me I wrote like a man. Or, his exact words, “You write like a dude. Like Hemingway or some shit.” Obviously I didn’t take this guy seriously. But for some reason this sprang to mind not too long ago. I came upon one of those sites where you paste an excerpt and… (more…)
Category Archives: Language
Paraprosdokians
Paraprosdokians are figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected; frequently humorous. (Winston Churchill loved them.) Where there’s a will, I want to be in it. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it’s still on my list. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright… (more…)
Amazon and foreign languages
Dear reader, It seems that Amazon is doing some very strange things with respect to foreign languages. On the friendly website of EbookFriendly.com, I found this article, which I will post here verbatim: (start quote) Amazon Is Removing from Kindle Store Books Published in Unsupported Languages The international policy of Amazon is mysterious. They ship Kindle Touch to over 170… (more…)
Top 10 grammar peeves
Enough said, I am sure.
Punctuation
Oh yes, I may already hear you think “what is this?”, dear reader. But not to worry, I shall try to keep this as entertaining as possible. In how many ways can punctuation be abused? Many and more, I am convinced. The over-use or total lack of periods and commas is something I don’t really appreciate. And I assume that… (more…)
tl;dr
Have you encountered this one, dear reader? “tl;dr”. More and more, the world is becoming overloaded with acronyms and abbreviations, everything is thrown in to make life and communication as fast as possible. (And while writing this, again I wonder why nobody has ever made a decent abbreviation for the word abbreviation, which is quite long for what it stands… (more…)
How the English language was developed
An entertaining video that in tells you how the English language came to be, 10 minutes.
One story. Many languages.
Have you ever read a story, and then read the same story in another language, dear reader? Did you find one or the other better, more amusing, more entertaining? Or were they equal in those and other ways? It is amazing for me to realise how large the difference in languages are, when putting a story from one into the… (more…)
Grammar
I just had to post this.
The art of words
How many words are there, dear reader (and dear writer as well)? As we know, there are lots of words. Enough words to fill encyclopedias and enormous libraries. Yet most of these words are the same ones, used over and over again, merely placed in a different sequence. There is a finite number of words, even when their number grows… (more…)
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