January 17, 2009
Hope for the future of yeah
I just found a thing on facebook that graphs usage of words on people's walls. And shockingly, a vast majority of people on facebook know how to spell yeah.
Posted by Will at 4:10 PM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2008
Diogenes Club: 3. New York Times: 0
From Alaska Senator Now Trails in Votes:
Republicans claimed then that traditional voting patterns among absentee voters favored Mr. Stevens’s holding on to win, but Mr. Begich countered that he had made a concerted effort to win early and absentee voters.
Mr. Begich can't make a concerted effort. A concerted effort requires more than one person so that they can work in concert with each other. I realize that it was probably Begich who made the mistake, but the Times should at least but quotes around it or add a [sic] or something.
Boo-yeah, New York Times!
(For reference: the other two times I sonned the Times: Strawberry Shortcake redux and This is probably the only chance I'll ever have at impugning the New York Times' accuracy)
Posted by Will at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
May 4, 2005
One day at Whole Foods
I was in the checkout line when one of the workers shouted out, "All lines are express."
A line can't be express if all the lines are express. To be express, you have to be quicker than another line. He could have just as easily said, "All these lines are the slowest," and it probably would have been more accurate.
Posted by Will at 11:26 PM | Comments (1)
November 16, 2004
Anna is
Some text from a subway Trimspa ad:
Get the attention you deserve... Anna is.
Now, how that made it to print is beyond me. It should either be 'Anna does,' or, I don't know, 'Be getting the attention you deserve.' Now, elsewhere, the ad does say 'Be envied,' so maybe 'Anna is' is a reference to that, but they're far apart and in different fonts.
My other problem with the ad is that it's all about how much weight Anna lost, but in every shot, her body is obscured by something. In the main picture, she's being given a piggy back ride by some guy. In another picture, we can see her face (glowering at us) and her shoulder, but that's about it. In another very small picture, we can see her full body, but for one, she's in this absurd 1930's swimsuit, and for two, her arm is covering the rest of her up because she's dancing with the piggy back guy.
Oh, and that glower and shoulder picture? It has a little subtitle: 'Trimspa baby!' There should be a comma between Trismpa and baby, but I don't even care about that anymore. Trimspa baby? Appending baby on the end of stuff was sort of tolerable for about a month after Austin Powers came out. But after two sequels and god knows how many lame imitations, geez. Why didn't they make it - 'Trimspa sucks. Not!' How about 'We're two wild and crazy guys! On Trimspa!' Or something equally dated and not funny.
And do women really want to take advice from Anna Nicole Smith on how to get attention?
Posted by Will at 3:27 PM | Comments (2)
September 29, 2004
We - the not royal kind
Two things. First:
Y'all. It's a Southern colloquialism. If you use it up north, and you're not, say, a rapper, people will make fun of you. But really, it's a useful word. It's a plural form for you. Proper English has no such pronoun. French has vous for its second person plural (and it doubles for the formal you, which, in all honesty, seems to me a bit dated). I'm sure other languages have equivalents. There's no reason English shouldn't. Y'all: Use it unabashedly.
And let's talk about 'we' for a second. It has two meanings: 'You and I,' and 'They and I.' Frankly, these two meanings are disparate enough that they should have two different words.
Imagine me in high school, approaching two friends. "We need to talk," says one of them. I pull up a chair. "What do you want to talk about?" The two friends smirk. "I meant we, us, not we you." A different pronoun would have saved me that scarring embarrassment.
I'm just saying.
Posted by Will at 6:34 AM | Comments (5)
