If only social media had been around in Shakespeare’s day. Back in February, an eight-year-old Italian boy used the word “petaloso” in a classroom assignment. The word doesn’t officially exist in the Italian language (apparently Italian has an equivalent of l’académie française called the Accademia della Crusca), so the boy’s teacher marked it as an incorrect word, but she also… Read more »
Yay – I’ve joined the flock! I signed up for my very first cellphone plan yesterday! Yes, it was April Fools’ Day, purely a coincidence, but to my mind at least, entirely appropriate. Ever since they became ubiquitous, I’ve looked upon cellphones with disdain, much as I look upon nose rings or fingers-full of rings. No prejudice here; I merely… Read more »
Why do people develop addictions? Is it to make their lives more pleasant, or merely less unpleasant, or does that depend upon where you are in the happiness scale? Why would a rich kid develop a coke habit? Why would anyone start sniffing lighter fluid or glue? What’s the point in tripping out on LSD? Rhetorical questions, every one of… Read more »
Prologue This is something I wrote in 2003, when the company I was working for was about to go through another re-org (read “downsize”). I held onto the piece at the time, just in case I’d written it in a moment of ‘temporary insanity.’ A few weeks later, I decided that the insanity was obviously permanent and published it to… Read more »
I try to theme my articles on this website around the Arts and Culture, but today’s piece might be a challenge. How’s this? “Have you ever seen people in a library or a study hall, fast asleep with their heads on the desk in front of them, maybe using their text books as a pillow? Have you ever thought that… Read more »
I was re-reading my article about the 2015 Word of the Year recently, and came to the section about Morse code. As that article states, the international prosign for a distress call is • • • – – – • • •. Without gaps between letters, this sequence of dots and dashes can mean “SOS”, “VTB”, “IJS”, “VGI” and “SMB”…. Read more »
People who know me well know my opinion of golf. “A good walk spoiled” is a polite and succinct way of putting it, I suppose, although I prefer to say, “why the heck anyone would want to pay that much to dress up in those overly-tidy clothes and lug all that hardware around a totally unnatural field and torture a… Read more »