Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and founder of the software company Dozuki, administers a grammar test to all prospective employees.
“Grammar is my litmus test,” he writes over at the Harvard Business Review blog. “All applicants say they’re detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.”
If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it’s, Wiens explains, “then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.”
Archaeologists found a 2,500-year-old brain in the UK. It has “the consistency of tofu,” and “none of the distinctive smell so often associated with dead corpses.”
A British crime writer admitted to using pseudonyms to pen glowing reviews of his work. Other writers are outraged. But then, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise.
It’s raining balls in Leicester.
And finally, great strides have been made toward a better understanding of spontaneous human combustion—using pork bellies marinated in acetone, naturally.
Rarely do we get political here at the last word, but this is really too much.
I know, I know. FOX News. Some of you are likely snickering already. So read the column yourself. It’s on page 8. What we have here is a State Department bureaucrat telling us that the “historical validity” of etymologies doesn’t matter. If someone’s offended by what you’ve written or said, by golly, you’re a bigot.
Is it me, or is this creepily Orwellian? A taxpayer-funded “Chief Diversity Officer” is using language as a cudgel with which to beat us into submission. That Nike didn’t have the cojones to tell people to put on their big-girl pants and shut up is distressing enough; that Mr. Robinson tacitly approves of the “public relations nightmare” the shoe company faced over a sneaker called a “Black and Tan,” well…wow.
Yes, language evolves. I’m a writer; I see it happening almost daily. But this isn’t about language at all. It’s about the professional grievance crowd smugly dictating what’s off-limits. Screw ’em.
So I was walking in San Francisco’s Chinatown a couple of weeks ago, and came across this guy camped out near the entrance to Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral. As you can see, he’s playing an erhu—a Chinese two-string fiddle. (This gives you a pretty good idea of what it sounds like.)
Anyway, what moved me to take his picture wasn’t the erhu itself—it was Chinatown, after all—but the music: “Auld Lang Syne” followed by “Oh! Susanna.” For reals.
Today’s Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day is “boofy.” It’s Australian slang, apparently.
Usually of a man or boy: large or muscular, and somewhat unsophisticated or simple-minded. Also: typically or stereotypically male in behaviour or interests; ‘blokeish’.
Though I’m not particularly muscular, I am large. And unsophisticated. And somewhat simple-minded. As for the other male in the office—CK—he’s partial to all manner of sporting events and unnecessary feats of athletic prowess, which makes him “stereotypically male in behaviour or interests.”
So…we’re both boofy? Maybe the Aussies should stick to meat pies.
Academics don’t write to be read; they write to be published, says Barton Swaim. As to why their writing is so uniformly awful, well…
Academics in the humanities and the social sciences, it’s sometimes suggested, too often wish to give their fields the legitimacy and public authority of science, and so write in highly technical, jargon-laced prose. Academics in the hard sciences, for their part, are too concerned with factual correctness to worry about making their productions agreeable, even to co-specialists. Then, of course, there is the really uncharitable interpretation: Many academics simply haven’t got anything useful to say, but if they say it in a sufficiently complicated fashion and use all the vogue terms, they’ll get credit for having said something without saying anything worth defending.
What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant? Randall Munroe has the answer—and it’s not pretty.
Where did the exclamation point come from? Nobody knows, apparently. But that didn’t stop Smithsonian.com from writing “The History of the Exclamation Point.”
Is there a limit to how tall buildings can get? Write a big enough check and all those pesky engineering problems just might go away. Nate Berg explains.
Think those online book reviews—you know, the ones with superlatives like “gripping,” “lyrical,” and “compelling”—are objective and impartial? Think again.
…here’s a gallery of “mosaic sculptures” of musicians—using actual CDs of the musicians themselves.
Mind = blown.
This is an old post, but it’s worth revisiting. Turns out people care about good writing. Who knew?
Via Grammar Monkeys.
Jonah Goldberg surmises that “at least 99 percent of the things we know are things other people figured out first.”
Discuss.
Just last week we brought your attention to an unfortunate misspelling. But thanks to our enormous reach and influence, few had a chance to see it before it was corrected. Here’s the new and improved version of the same billboard, shot Saturday night:
Now, as someone who once made his living as a proofreader—and who is still charged with those duties on occasion—I have to smile at what happened here. Someone had to write the headline; someone had to design the layout; someone had to print the material; someone had to apply that material to the billboard. And all along the way, there were others, no doubt with degrees and qualifications and important-sounding job titles, who signed off on it.
What’s the point? That, despite our rather vain attempts to arrive at perfection, people still make mistakes. Even collectively. So maybe we should all lighten up a little.
The 200-lb. cast aluminum 2.4-liter V8 that powers the Red Bull RB08 is capable of going from 0 to 100 mph and back to 0 in under five seconds—while easily reaching 18,000 RPM.
Oh…and it’s also musically gifted:
The winners of the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced. Though this year’s entries seem, on balance, to be somewhat weaker than previous years’, Cathy Bryant’s grand prize-winning effort is positively sublime:
As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.
Likewise the winning entry in the “Crime” category, submitted by Sue Fondrie:
She slinked through my door wearing a dress that looked like it had been painted on…not with good paint, like Behr or Sherwin-Williams, but with that watered-down stuff that bubbles up right away if you don’t prime the surface before you slap it on, and—just like that cheap paint—the dress needed two more coats to cover her.
Apparently, Facebook is populated by individuals “carefully stage-managing their online image.” And “browsing Facebook or another social media site increases our levels of narcissism as well as our self-esteem.”
In other news, shooting black tar heroin in your eyeballs is bad for you.
Saw this billboard in my neighborhood last night.
Help me out here. Am I missing out on some sort of inside joke?