Yes, another complaint … I’m looking at a schedule for the Edmonton Oilers to see what games are televised and what channels they are on. And I’m seeing acronyms left and right.
Fine. I understand why they are using acronyms. Full names, like Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, take up too much space. Much cleaner to simply have […]
The Adobe people are pushing their Adobe Creative Suite 3 these days (for those who love acronyms, aka Adobe CS3). And that’s fine but I find that they, along with many other companies that market using email, send very little content and a whole lot of design.
It’s makes sense in one way, if you’re Adobe, […]
Apparently Shakespeare’s use of language is good for your head. It gets it all excited and twitchy as it’s forced to do engage in that unusual process of thinking.
In particular, Shakespeare’s use of a linguistic technique known as a functional shift, where a part of speech is employed in an unusual way — a noun […]
Why will a business like this work? Because some one does it for you. As one of the best books on Web sites says, Don’t Make Me Think.
Almost every consumer knows, anything related to technology is a pain in the butt. Even if you have the right kind of mind for tech things, there are […]
I wandered over to Gapingvoid and saw that the word “cool” (as in, “cool prizes“) isn’t the only word that needs to be turfed from the copywriting lexicon. I see we need a new word to replace “luxury.”
Hugh writes, “One of the most unpleasant jobs I ever had was writing a 10,000 word brochure for […]
Could we please pass a law that makes it illegal to use “great†and “cool†as modifiers in marketing copy? Or any copy for that matter!
Why would you say you have a great product? Is there a company on the planet that doesn’t claim to have a great product? What exactly does saying something is […]
Posted in Language, Writing on March 22nd, 2006 3 Comments »
I always mix them up. Even though I know the difference, I mix them up. Actually, it’s my fingers that do. My brain knows the difference. The fingers do not. The difference between brains and fingers is brains care, fingers don’t.
The effect is misused words. The affect is to get me slapping my head afterwards […]
You’ll see references to the word “lens†all over the Internet. I don’t mean lens as in a camera lens but lens as it is referred to in Web 2.0 terms, marketing and business.
What you won’t find is a definition. So, what do they mean when they refer to a “lens�
I dunno.
This question came up […]
One of the intriguing things about looking at blog statistics is, over time, you see what interests people. And, at least to some small degree, you can see who is interested in what posts.
Of all the posts I’ve written, the one that keeps coming up is Language as a communication barrier, which I posted just […]
Because I have something of an obsession with wind and weather, I recently read Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind : The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry. It turns out to be an interesting, if somewhat eccentric, study of making something useable.
If nothing else, the book illustrates how the idea […]
