Entries Tagged 'FYI' ↓

From The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law:

convince, persuade. You may be convinced that something or of something. You must be persuaded to do something.

Right: The robbers persuaded him to open the vault.

Wrong: The robbers convinced him to open the vault.

Right: The robbers convinced him that it was the right thing to do.

Wrong: The robbers persuaded him that it was the right thing to do.

Our book Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure is now featured in Time Magazine in an article about our country’s new fondness for brevity.

Short is in. Online Americans, fed up with e-mail overload and blogorrhea, are retreating into micro-writing. Six-word memoirs. Four-word film reviews. Twelve-word novels. Mini-lit is thriving.

=read article=

Two Bigfoot hunters, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, say they have the carcass of the creature, left. From left, Mr. Whitton; Tom Biscardi, a Bigfoot booster; and Mr. Dyer.

From the New York Times, posted here to save you the trouble of logging in:

By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: August 14, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — In the hairy and hoax-filled history of Bigfoot, those who believe in the mythical beast have offered up all manner of evidence, from grainy photos to hoarse recordings to tracks of those aforementioned feet.

But on Friday at a hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., a pair of Bigfoot hunters say they will present what they contend is the most definitive proof yet of an animal that science says does not exist: DNA evidence and photographs of a dead specimen they say they found in a remote swath of woods in northern Georgia.

“It was very frightening at first,” said Rick Dyer, 31, a former corrections officer who — coincidentally — runs a business that offers Bigfoot tours. “And it got even more frightening when you saw the others.”

Indeed, Mr. Dyer said he and his partner, Matthew Whitton, saw three more of the beasts nearby as they dragged the body of said creature out of the woods. Moreover, Mr. Dyer says he has video clips and photographs to prove it.

One photograph provided to the news media showed what resembled a gorilla — or maybe an old sheepskin rug — lying twisted in a freezer, with a dollop of intestines protruding from its belly.

“There’s a lot of comment being made that it looks fake, or it looks like a suit,” Mr. Dyer said. “But these people wasn’t there when I was sweating, pulling this thing through the woods.”

Tom Biscardi, a longtime Bigfoot booster from the Bay Area, who traveled to Georgia to see the animal, said he was “150 percent” sure that the carcass was a Bigfoot, an American Indian legend whose modern fame dates to an elaborate “footprint” hoax perpetrated at a Northern California logging camp in 1958.

“This is ‘Eureka!’ man,” said Mr. Biscardi, whose operations include a Bigfoot Web site, a Bigfoot merchandise line and a Bigfoot Internet radio show. “I touched it.”

Both Mr. Biscardi and Mr. Dyer said they expected skeptics to discount the find, which is being kept in a freezer in an undisclosed location outside Atlanta. But they promised even more proof, including video, a DNA test and, of course, a mission to capture one of the big guys.

“I’m not asking anyone to believe us,” Mr. Dyer said. “I’m just asking them to sit and watch, because you’re going to eat your words.”

=link to NYT story=

=link to CNN story=

=link to MSNBC story=

=link to AP story=

On a related note, has anybody seen the Geico Caveman lately?

Let’s pause to consider our underused word of the day. Back it bring can we, together pull all we if. Did that last sentence confuse you? On going what’s understand you once it of jist the get you’ll, there in hang. Actually, mine’s not entirely correct; the keyboard cannot type mirrored characters, and I’m treating words, not letters, as units. Exploring worth concept similar a it’s, hell the what but. So check it out and have fun with it:

WORD:
boustrophedon

PRONUNCIATION:
(boo-struh-FEED-n, -FEE-don)

MEANING:
noun: A method of writing in which lines are written alternately in opposite direction, from left to right, and right to left.

ETYMOLOGY:
From boustrophedon, literally ox-turning, referring to the movement of an ox while plowing a field, from bous (ox) and strophe (turning). It’s the same strophe that shows up in catastrophe (literally, an overturning) and apostrophe (literally, turning away, referring to the omission of a letter.

NOTES:
In such writing, each letter on the alternate lines was written as in a mirror image or rotated 180 degrees. We still do many things boustrophedonically, such as mowing the lawn, vacuuming the floor, etc. In many computer printers, such as dot-matrix and inkjet, the print head usually moves in the boustrophedon mode (though thankfully doesn’t print letters mirrored or rotated).

(andreas via wordsmith.org: source)

Scientists are one step closer to creating an invisibility cloak using two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way.

Now if they can just create a clock that skews time diagonally…

Via ProofreadNOW, a quick study of two commonly confused words as conducted by Garner’s Modern American Usage, the standard for law-firm style. Garner writes:

Flammable, inflammable. The first is now accepted as standard in American English and British English alike. Though examples of its use date back to 1813, in recent years it has become widespread as a substitute for inflammable, in which some people mistook the prefix in- to be negative rather than intensive. Traditionally, the forms were inflammable and noninflammable; today they are flammable and nonflammable. By the mid-20th century, purists had lost the fight to retain the older forms.

Even staunch descriptivists endorsed the prescriptive shift from inflammable to flammable–e.g.: “A word is bad if it is ambiguous to such a degree that it leads to misunderstanding. For me, the perfect example of such a word is flammable, if it is applied to substances. As most dictionaries now recognize, inflammable can be confused with non-combustible, and so lead to accidents.” Archibald A. Hill, “Bad Words, Good Words, Misused Words,” in Studies in English Linguistics for Randolph Quirk 250, 252 (1983).

An era in Boston has come to an end as the Red Sox trade Manny Ramirez to the Los Angeles Dodgers today just before the 4PM trading deadline.

We went to the ballgame last night, now officially the last non-Manny Dodger game, missing him by a matter of hours. Dodger Stadium will be a much different joint in the next couple months.

2008 World Series Prediction:

DODGERS OVER THE ANGELS IN SEVEN!

We often use words or phrases to describe words within sentences, and we determine the meaning of sentences by placing these descriptives next to the words they point to or “modify”.

A modifier is a word or a phrase that describes something else. You should place it as close as possible to what it describes.

Sometimes we are careless and place descriptive phrases away from the words they modify, making our sentences unclear or inaccurate. These phrases are called misplaced modifiers. Be aware of misplaced modifiers that allow for unintended (and often humorous) interpretations. Consider the following:

• Here are some helpful suggestions for protecting your valuables from our hotel security staff.
• The young girl was walking the dog in the short skirt.
• The dog was chasing the boy with the spiked collar.

In these examples it is easy to see what went wrong. The security staff are not thieves, the dog isn’t wearing a short skirt, and the boy probably doesn’t have a spiked collar. Because the modifier is misplaced, we need to think for a second before we understand the intended meaning. The correct versions are:

• Here are some helpful suggestions from our hotel security staff for protecting your valuables.
• The young girl in the short skirt was walking the dog.
• The dog with the spiked collar was chasing the boy.

See how the proper placement clarifies the meaning? (You might be surprised to find out how often we make corrections just like these in everyday writing, such as white papers, brochures, and proposals!) By placing the modifiers correctly you can eliminate the possibility that your reader will misunderstand, and you’ll have a better chance of getting your point across.

Source: The Gregg Reference Manual.

It seems Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” has come to a screeching halt.

The script got good early reviews. But for months the Web has been pulsing with rumors and in-depth accounts that when Jonze had a research screening last December, kids in the audience were crying and fleeing the theater–not exactly the reaction the studio had hoped for.

Mmmm. Cult classic. Now I really wanna see it. Before it’s “fixed”. YouTube leaks, anyone?

I’m a big fan of ProofreadNOW.com, and receive their regular newsletter. It typically includes a column on grammar and how it relates to “AP style”, as well as other proprietary styles for rags like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Geeky stuff for lovers of words.

Yesterday’s newsletter included a short list of terms that can often throw a writer into a roadblock, with their proper punctuation and capitalization falling into a blurry area. Included in this particular list were pairs of similar and often confused terms (disc and disk; follow up and follow-up; Bible and biblical), with a breakdown of their proper usage.

There was a particular pair of terms I thought would fit perfectly into yesterday’s column: “real time” and “real-time”. The proper use of each of those terms has been a source of debate between myself and others a few times over the years. I threw an email to the ProofreadNOW.com editor:

Greetings. Big fan of the regular newsletter.

In this particular batch of tips, I would’ve liked to see a comparative analysis of “real-time” and “real time”. I see the hyphenated version misused constantly, and have developed a bit of a pet peeve over it.

They’re both relatively new terms, so the jury is probably still out. But my argument would be that “real-time” is an adjective, whereas “real time” is a noun. That is, “We receive our real-time news feeds in real time.”

Jace Albao
http://jaced.com

I just received the following reply:

Thanks for your e-mail, and your kind comment about our Grammar Tip letter.

Regarding real time and real-time, the jury has been in since 1993, when the Merriam-Webster 10th Collegiate Dictionary came out. (The 11th came out in 2003.) They agree with you!

In the 10th and 11th you can find this for “real time”:

————————————————————————
Main Entry: real time
Function: noun
Date: 1953

: the actual time during which something takes place partly analyze the data in real time (as it comes in) - R. H. March>

-real-time adjective

————————————————————————

Note the date - 1953 - when the term was first used in the public domain.

Thanks for reading!

Yours truly,

Phil Jamieson

George on death:

Along with approximately seventy-nine trillion other things, I’m part Wyandot Indian. The Anglofied spelling of our people is “Wyandotte”, with their motherland being smack dab in the middle of the United States in Kansas.

My maternal grandmother, Gran, is the person that gave me this heritage. I just received an informative email from her, and rather than explain, I figure I’ll just post it here:

Hi Jace:

I have been “googling” just now and…

Time out for a second. Gran’s in her nineties and she’s getting her Google on. Does she not rock or what? LOVE IT.

Sorry about the interruption. Anyway:

Hi Jace:

I have been “googling” just now and brought up “Jace Daniel Albao.” At the mention of Wyandot I suddenly noticed the paragraph about the Wyandot Cemetery in Kansas City, Kansas. It tells of 100 years struggle to maintain this land as a cemetery, with other tribes wanting to establish it for commercial gambling. My mother told me at one time that it had been considered a shrine.

My Indian family is buried there, including my grandmother and grandfather, which took place in my lifetime, plus several generations of family. It hurts me very much to recall my grandmother’s many futile efforts to regain the land that had once been ours (where the present airport exists today) and it was her prime interest for many years. She even went to Washington D.C. to study and research at the Congressional Library and later could talk for hours on the subject. And my greatest regret is she died before the decision to award to 400 Indians the $1600 that was rightfully theirs. My children were awarded the original $1600, as they were all at least 18 years of age. My grandchildren, except Heather, received their checks bearing interest accrued by the time each was 18 years old. You now know a little part of the story and should understand that’s how you were able to buy your first car, if I correctly recall.

Another thing I remember: the tribe was Catholic and in my mother’s family her mother (my grandmother) was one of three sisters all Catholic, but at an early age she became a Protestant. No doubt this caused some friction at times.

Just a bit of family history I’ve given you. Google does a good job of explaining the history of the Wyandots. I find as I grow OLD that reminiscing plays an important role in my life.

Take care and invite us to see your beautiful home once it’s finished.

Love,

Gran

Thanks Gran. Much love backatcha. I’ll have a bottle of scotch ready. How do you and Grandpa like your filet mignon?

Today’s Vive’s third birthday. For his party, we just spent a couple hours at the beach doing one of his favorite things: chasing the ball around at the edge of the sea. Truth is, he probably doesn’t even realize that today is anything other than one of our typical sunny Sundays.

I recently took a gander at his baby pictures. My, how he’s grown. And a great watchdog at that.

I suppose three makes him twenty-one in dog years. Now he can legally hit the pub with me. Happy birthday, dude!

Learn something every day. I just had a meeting with a few systems engineers. Have you ever heard of this thing called atchtiemed? Pronounced “awtch-tee-em-med”.

I hadn’t either. Evidently it stands for HyperText Markup Language.