Posts from — January 2008

What is the deal with people using apostrophes to make words plural? I saw a giant sign a couple of days ago advertising “Condo’s For Sale” at the entrance to this new development. I also saw one of those roadside signs stuck in the ground that said “Hey Mom’s! Make money at home now!”

(Insert scream here.)

Unless a large chunk of the world blacked out during grades 1-12, I have no idea where this came from, but it needs to stop. People do notice, and if you mess up something on a sign with fewer than ten words on it, why on earth would they trust you to build them a condo or help them start a new career at home?

Mistakes happen, but if large amounts of money are on the line and all you have to do is proofread a sign or a letter, proofread it again and again. Then have other people proofread it, too.

For the record: Never, ever make a word plural using an apostrophe + s. An apostrophe with an s indicates possession. Therefore, Let’s weigh the pro’s and con’s is incorrect. I actually saw this on a greeting card. It’s simply Let’s weigh the pros and cons. Now that I’ve pointed this out to you, you will see it everywhere.

The letter s does not like being ostracized from other letters in a word. Representatives of The Letter S Foundation are now taking legal action to regain its rightful place in the family of letters.

You can read more ranting about apostrophes in my writing guide.

Having a good color palette for your web site makes it a lot easier to read. You don’t have to go overboard like a lot of people do, but you should create an environment that enhances the ability of your visitors to take in what you have to say. Content is still key, but your design should make your content more enjoyable rather than distract from it.

There are a handful of really nice tools out there to help you select a complimentary color palette for your site. Talking up the paint mixer at your local hardware store is a great idea, but here’s one that’s open all hours.

I have no idea who Big Huge Labs is, but their Palette Generator is great. You can tell it what image you want to analyze by uploading it, entering the image’s URL, or linking to your Flickr or Photobucket account. It then gives you a bunch of colors – complete with the hexadecimal codes for use on your web site – that compliment the colors used in the picture.

Brilliant stuff! I guess you could use it for picking colors to paint a room in your home, but I’m hopeless with painting. Enjoy!

There is no grammar rule in this world that frustrates me more than figuring out which version of lay or lie I should use in a particular situation.

Grammar Girl (genuflect when you say that) put the transcript to her podcast about this issue up on her web site along with a helpful table that explains how to use them.

So, go read “Lay Versus Lie”. These things do matter. Perhaps one of these days this issue will stop vexing me.

The American Dialect Society just came out with its 2007 words of the year. Subprime is this year’s winner. The rest of the list is a great read. View the press release containing the full list.

I love wrap rage, defined as “the anger brought on by the frustration of trying to open a factory-sealed purchase.” If there’s a word of the year for parents, that would be it.

Senator Larry Craig has the dubious honor of inspiring two less-than-complimentary words on the nominees list. Not the sort of mark you’d like to make in the annals of linguistic history.

Free Rice

Now you can play the most addicting vocabulary game in the world and help donate rice to the hungry at the same time. For every word you can define correctly, 20 grains of rice are donated courtesy of the site’s advertisers.

The maximum level you can attain is 50. Getting over 40 is quite doable for anyone with a decent vocabulary as the levels jump up quickly at first. Once you get over 42 or 43, it takes a lot of words to move up one level. It gets exponentially harder to move up a step as your score increases, and the words get much harder as you go. Miss a word and your score drops.

I have no idea how much this equals in real terms, but all the various players helped donate 7 billion grains of rice in December. It’s a brilliant achievement in just three months.

Visuwords – online graphical dictionary and thesaurus

Now visual thinkers and learners have a dictionary just for them! Visuwords is so cool it defies description. Instead of typing in a word and getting a definition or some synonyms, Visuwords shows words and concepts related to your keyword in graphical form. You have to see it to believe it.

You may have to scroll down a little to see the key to the colors and arrows, but it’s quite intuitive without it.

Merriam-Webster selected w00t – an interjection that conveys celebration of an accomplishment, like ‘yippee’ – as its Word of the Year for 2007. The purist part of me feels like this is another sign of the apocalypse. The rest of me is proud of M-W for being creative and open-minded.

It feels like the modern equivalent of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. When anything reminds me of Whitman, that’s a good thing. After M-W posted the award, I realized how much I use w00t in everyday speech, so I’m onboard.

Even though w00t evolved from a hacker-invented language called l33t (pronounced ‘leet’), in my mind I connect it with its evil twin, ‘IM speak’. It’s no secret to people who know me that I despise all the abbreviations used in text messaging. I know writing messages on a microscopic phone keyboard is hard, which is why I don’t bother with it.

When used in e-mail, I think it’s just plain lazy writing. If you type with any real speed, the amount of time you’d save by using it is negligible and hardly worth the hit your credibility as a writer takes from it.

[Read more →]