رقم سبعة
Woo hoo, the first weekly blog entry in quite some time. It almost seems to soon to be writing again. Today I’m going to be talking about yet another blog, The Slot (www.theslot.com). The Slot is the creation of Bill Walsh a witty copy editor. He points out grammatical mistakes, often with good humor. Being a bit of a grammar snob and sarcastic myself this blog is entetertaining to me. So today I’m going to talk about a couple of his posts.
The first post here is about abbreviations used for statenames used by the postal service vs. the abreviations used by newspaper. Newspapers tend to use abreviations such as Calif. or Mich. for the sake of clarity since many people don’t know postal abreviations. For example AK could be Arkansas, but in reality it’s Alaska. While people should really know the postal abbreviations, it’s the copy editdor’s job to make sure that everything is as clear as can be. As if his point wasn’t clear enough, the post is illustrated with a drawing of a newspaper and the text “Ceci n’est pas une envellope” (this is not an envelope). This sort of clever irony is quite entertaining.
The next post talks about retronyms, a term that may have become used as the word evolved. For example, before electric guitars, acoustic guitars were just guitars and before roller skates, ice skates were just skates. Unfortunately some people have taken such terms to certain extremes. Walsh cites two examples, the first coming from the packaging of some item he had purchased. The item had been marked “wet ice”. Now we’ve all heard of dry ice, but most people still find the word ice synonymous with “wet ice”. Web editors have come up with another term, “unique visitors” to describe how many individuals have accessed a site, but not how many times each one visited. This isn’t a “unique visitor” count. It’s the difference between the number of visitors and the number of visits. His example here is that if you said that 4 visitors came for dinner last night, you wouldn’t think that 2 people came, went out for a smoke and came back in to make 4 “visitors”. Once again I can’t help but laugh at this because it makes so much sense. Don’t invent new words to describe things that already exist and don’t need clarification. Duh.
I’ll try not to.
Um, shouldn’t it be “Bill Walsh, a witty copy editor”? Really David, if you are doing an entry on a grammar stickler, put your commas in!
“Punctuate with your brain, not find and replace.”
LOLZ.
editdor’s
wow, david. DAVID COMER: GRAMMER SNOB.
notice, i spelled grammar wrong. i felt that i needed to point that out because you seemed to have trouble realizing grammar mistakes on things that are published to the internet.