Posts tagged “English”

• The key difference between a calque and a loanword is that a loanword isn’t translated into English whereas a calque is. – surprisingly not via kottke, although he posted it, too!
• Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are television writer/producers with over forty years of combined experience — on shows including Lost, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, and Helix — and they have a great podcast.
• Should We Be Punching Nazis? You already know where I stand on this.
• My sons and I love Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford podcast about mistakes and what we should learn from them. (He’s also written a children’s book, The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up.)
• Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
• Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
• What are Progressive Web Apps?

When you see in an old book the letter “y” where we’d use “th” (“ye olde… etc“), that letter was not pronounced as a “y.” The substitution was just a printer convention to make typesetting easier. “Ye” was pronounced “the”…
– via David Frum

• News & Notes
  • Couple married 72 years dies holding hands — from kottke.org
  • Jason Kottke also published an epic round-up of all the best stories, comments, obituaries, collections, videos, etc. about Steve Jobs.
  • Top Ten Misused English Words — from listverse.com
  • 4 Personal Finance Principles That Would Make Your Grandfather Proud — from The Art of Manliness
  • Stellar.io is just awesome. Seriously. Trust me on this one. (Let me know if you want an invitation.)
• Apps
  • Amazing Breaker is a fun (free) breakout game.
  • Can anyone explain the difference between the Starbucks app and the Starbucks Card Mobile app?
• Tech
  • If you have an iPhone running iOS5, open the iTunes app on your phone. Click “More” in the lower right-hand corner. Choose “Tones”. You’ll see that there is now a new section of Star Wars ringtones. (I can’t understand how this wasn’t front page news.)
  • See also: How to make custom tones for your iPhone — from macworld.com
  • If I’m going to get a MacBook Air, then it looks like I’m also going to get a new Thunderbolt display. — via Shawn Blanc
  • Incredible macro photographs taken with iPhone 4S camera — from campl.us
  • Shit Siri Says Is, indeed, quite funny. (On Sunday I was upset when Siri couldn’t connect to the Internet and was unable to tell me the distance from Key West to Cuba. When I said, “Blow me!” in frustration, she said, “David! The language!”)
• Sports
  • Quote of the day: “…it’s clear that marketing people underestimated [Tim Tebow’s] intangibles and popularity.” — Tebow’s Eye Black

• Looking for free WiFi access? There is, of course, an app for that.
• Great idea: Are You An Asshole? (.com)
• I really need to get my tickets for the 10th Annual Kickspit Underground Rock Festival!
• You’ve seen the Periodic Table of Candy and the Periodic Table of Booze, of course. There are lots of periodic tables of things on the ‘net. That’s why someone made a Periodic Table of Periodic Tables.
• It’s Literally, A Web Log: An English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word “literally”.
• The big, unspoken problem with immortality is that eventually we’ll run out of room on the planet for any species that doesn’t die. Luckily (?) for us, there’s lots of room in the world’s oceans, because scientists have recently discovered a jellyfish that lives forever. I, for one, welcome our new jellyfish overlords.

I can’t stand when people say, “I could care less.”

“I could care less,” is one of those little things that drives me absolutely batshit crazy. If you could care less, it means you care. That’s not what you mean when you say that, is it? What you mean is that you don’t care. Someone posted this handy little graphic in a discussion forum and it really helps. (Click it to see!) Do you get it now?