This post was originally posted to NewTumbl. I’m surprised that a clip from a front page of a British tabloid newspaper was ruled M by a moderator here after I made it O. It was critical of British cabinet minister Matt Hancock and made fun of his surname, with two words that rhymed with its […]
Tag: language
More things that don’t work: Google knowledge panels, and typing in te reo Māori in Facebook
A guide to emojis for 2020. Just for clarification: 😷 = happy😷 = angry😷 = laughing😷 = sad#COVID19 #emoji — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) September 5, 2020 At least Twitter works. Google, as usual, doesn’t. I had a check to see how Lucire was performing in a Google search yesterday and noticed there was […]
The ‘A’ (Aotearoa) Team
Now that Aotearoa New Zealand has lifted our COVID-19 restrictions after getting rid of the virus on our shores, other than keeping our border closed, I Tweeted: Last time I felt this much part of a national team was when celebrities sang ‘Sailing Away’ to the tune of ‘Pokarekare Ana’. #COVID19 — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 […]
Alone again, naturally
Looking back over the years And whatever else that appears, I remember I cried when my mother died Never wishing to hide the tears. And at fifty-nine years old, My father, God rest his soul, Couldn’t understand why the only lass He had ever loved had been taken, Leaving him to start With a heart […]
Business as usual at Wikipedia
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 […]
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 […]