Kahlil Gibran
I recently read The Prophet, a fascinating book by Kahlil Gibran, a man who had a fascinating life as an artist and a writer in both Arabic and English. He was a Lebanese intellectual who spent most of...
View ArticleSpelling and Grammar
When you send e-mails full of misspellings and errant apostrophes, people judge you. And by people, I mean me. It’s better than fashionable: it’s useful. Wildly original and excessively heterodox...
View ArticleTullamore Toastmasters Competition Night
I’m now managing the blog for Tullamore Toastmasters. Why not come along to our competition night? TRiG.
View Article“So Hot!”
Did you know that hot was used to mean “sexually attractive” as long ago as 1450? (Though it seems that in earlier use, it more commonly meant “sexually attracted“.) TRiG.
View ArticleDo it, dolt!
We’re all familiar with the ubiquitous OK and Cancel buttons on modal windows. Any computer program will at some point ask us whether to go ahead with a certain action, and the standard buttons are OK...
View ArticleComic Book Grammar
Convention becomes tradition, and acquires weight. This guide to the workings of comic-book speech bubbles showcases how this can work. One thing not mentioned is the flowery borders used by the...
View ArticleWriting Signs (in Unicode)
Here’s a little article I wrote a while ago about signed languages, and the various efforts that have been used to make them writable. Sutton SignWriting is probably the most interesting. I have...
View ArticleMaamtrasna Murders: Photos
The Maamtrasna murders, 130 years ago, were shockingly brutal, but they are more remembered today for the blatant miscarrage of justice in the following court case. Myles Joyce was hung, protesting his...
View ArticleAttack of the Mutant Expressions
On h2g2, Malabarista takes a fun look at eggcorns, those strange idioms which, fossillized in our language, suddenly mutate unrestrained from the diktats of logic or common sense. TRiG.
View Article“treating other people with respect”
I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile. — Neil Gaiman
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