I know Wikipedia is full of fiction, so what’s one more? I know, you’re thinking: why don’t you stop moaning and go and fix it if it’s such a big deal? First up, for once I actually did try, as I thought the deletion of a sentence would be easy enough. But the […]
Tag: language
Breaking Hart’s
Usually, all our publications use Hart’s Rules. It’s well understood, enough compositors know it, and it’s a credible enough style guide for us to point at and use as a defence. There are some departures, which so far few have complained to me about. 1. Citation style. The OUP publishes The British Year Book […]
Seasonal Canadian humour
My thanks to Sydney-based photographer Robert Catto for linking me to this one, especially near the festive season. It is funnier than the one I took in Sweden many years ago, which in pun-land could be racist: The sad thing is, at some point, the majority will not get […]
The 1970s: when TV shows were New
As a child of the 1970s, I was exposed to this English word: new. Now, before you say that that isn’t anything special, for some reason, in the ’70s, there was an obsession with newness. It wasn’t like the news (by this I mean the plural of new) of Amsterdam or Zealand, but an adjective […]
When you let amateurs like Rees-Mogg write style guides
I thought I could be archaic on a few things—I still use diphthongs in text in our publications (æsthetic, Cæsar), the trio of inst., ult. and prox. in written correspondence, and even fuel economy occasionally in mpg (Imperial) because I am useless at ℓ/100 km and too few countries use km/ℓ. However, even I had […]
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Americans like big numbers
Scott Milne and I had a little fun over ‘American English’ recently on Twitter (and hopefully US friends will see this in the humour in which it was intended). He wrote: It's the 23rd of November. Black Friday's are the 13th. Unless I am missing some imported America bullshit, I call bullshit. — Scott Milne […]
Don’t group Chinese New Zealanders into one faceless bunch
Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I don’t think this was meant as a compliment. Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an […]
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Is the death of expertise tied to the Anglosphere?
Foreign and Commonwealth Office Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance. I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests. There’s a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know it’s not an exclusively […]
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Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics out in China with a new edition
My good friend Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics hit China a year ago, and it’s been so successful that the second edition is now out. It looks smarter, too, with its red cover, and I’m sure Chinese readers will get a decent taste of Stefan’s writing style, humour and thinking. I even hope this will pave […]
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Wikipedia corrects serious error after 12 years
Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years. Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the ‘Ford CE14 platform’ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipedia’s inadequacies, […]
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