Editorial & Opinion

E-Mail vs. Email – The 2011 Dissociated Press Stylebook

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on March 20, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

As a Grammarchist, I think it’s time we try the world’s Grammar Nazis for their crimes.

Please do not confuse the parody image
above with the actual Associated Press
Stylebook iPhone app. Or is that “i-Phone”?

A year ago, I sent The Associated Press an e-mail via their web site. Aside from the fact that the preceding statement is untrue, can you tell me what is wrong with that last sentence? Well, if you had read it a year ago, nothing. But last year – as you may know – the AP stylebook people decided that “web site” should be “website”, and just the other day, they decided “e-mail” will now be “email”. But does it really matter what the AP says these days, if in fact it ever did? I have an ancient copy (1992) of The Associated Press Stylebook (that’s a link to the upcoming edition), which mostly resides on my bookshelf to mislead visitors into believing that I’m moderately literate. I certainly don’t apply its rules to this site, for several reasons. Amongst those reasons are the fact that I never studied journalism or writing, and the fact that this site is not a news source, it’s just a thing I do to amuse myself while forcing myself to write a couple hundred words daily. The fact that a fair percentage of those who visit the site confuse it with something credible is hardly my problem. But even if I did consider myself a journalist, and even if I did consider this site a serious channel for “news”, I don’t know how faithfully I would adhere to any of the more respected style guides anyway, including the AP’s. By the way, do you like the way I ended that last sentence? I do. That’s because – in spite of minding my use of “to”, “two”, and “too”, or “lay” and “lie”, and the fact that me and Suzy never go to the store, and in spite of doing my best to spell things correctly and other basics of decent grammar – I’ve come to consider myself something of a Grammarchist, as opposed to a Grammar Nazi. Which is why I just had a blast with a really run-on sentence. For the record, I’m well aware that much of the writing on this site is an orgy of errors and a never-ending sentence clause catastrophe; I intentionally write in the voice with which I speak. But I’m breaking one of my only rules here, which is writing self-referential content. So back to the point. The AP guide in particular amuses me; as David Schwartz, an instructor at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication points out in this piece, the guide has a few problems. He hits on a few of the ones that I’ve always found tedious or absurd, like state abbreviations (Calif. instead of CA, etc.) and the rules for presenting numeric information as words vs. numerals. The latter in particular has always bugged me. There’s (that’s an intentional contraction!) plenty of sense in using numerals for quantities like “millions” and “billions”, since most people would never in 1,000,000,000,000,000 years realize that the number just presented was 1 quadrillion (or a thousand trillion, or a million billion, as a Brit might say). But otherwise, why use words for figures up to ten (or 10) and then suddenly switch to numerals? I personally will continue to trust my judgment on the ability of the reader to grasp the figures being presented. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s difficult for most people to conceptualize large numbers in a useful way in the first place. And words like “e-mail”? Until the AP style guide decides to apply the same rule to “e-commerce” and “e-book”, I’m keeping the hyphen. And if they later decide that other e-words should lose the hyphens? I think I’ll keep them anyway. I’m convinced that the AP is just doing piecemeal releases to sell more print copies, much like software giants Microsoft and Adobe ruin perfectly functional software with pointless and costly upgrades. And why buy a copy of the AP stylebook when Reuters serves one up for free?

I’d Gladly Walk Your Dogma But I’d Have To Park My Karma

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on March 3, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

A special thanks to Charlie Sheen, Craig Ferguson, and the Milky Way.

If I adhered to established but unspoken Internet Dogma (let’s call it “Blogma”), I should be assembling some kind of witty piece comparing Charlie Sheen’s recent rants with those of Muammar Gaddafi, like this Guardian Whose Line Is It? quiz. But the fact is, I’m failing to find much humor in an insane dictator who dresses like Little Richard and kills his own citizens with hired guns from nearby devastated African countries. I also have a little trouble seeing any real humor in a deranged, egotistical, embattled drug addict embarrassing himself in the media. Regarding the first issue, I’ve always believed that killing is a really, really horrible thing. I’ve only actually watched two people die in person, but I can’t imagine why someone would cause that to happen to someone else on purpose. And regarding the second issue? As fun as drugs can be, they don’t really do anything positive that can’t be accomplished without them. I speak with a little experience in that area too; although I finally knocked it off a few years ago, I managed to consume pretty much every drug available to man, and in excess for many years. At the height of that silliness, I was “banging three gram rocks”, not seven grams like Charlie. But that’s “war story” stuff, and as any veteran of either real war or a personal war on one’s own addictions knows, war stories are stupid. They try to glorify something that fundamentally sucks. So lately, as I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the human dramas and catastrophes around the world – from the Middle East to the Midwest to down under, I realized I needed to re-center. To put things in perspective, and focus on sensible things. And watching Charlie Sheen’s rants actually helped, because he reminded me of the self-deluded person I was not too long ago. But what probably helped more was the clip below from Craig Ferguson’s TV show in which he compares making fun of Sheen to making fun of lunatics in Bedlam in the 17th century. I’ve never watched Ferguson’s show, but it was heartening to see a pop media figure showing a little humanity without coming across as preachy. And what probably has given me even more perspective over the last couple of days is the video below that one, which is simply a time-lapse clip of the Milky Way and a night of stars moving across the sky over Lake Tahoe. As I grasp for brief moments what it is that I’m seeing seeing, as our planet spins in one direction against a background of stars in the shape of a huge spiral moving another direction, with space debris occasionally streaking across the sky as it burns up in our atmosphere, for those brief moments I get a little perspective on how grand and magical the universe really is, and how maybe I need to just focus on my little corner for a bit. Thanks Charlie. Thanks Craig. Thanks Milky Way.

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Google Cleans Up Content Farm Search Result Spam – Finally

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 26, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Saturday, February 26th, 2011

After some high-profile tech industry grumbling, Google has finally tackled the problem of content farms like Demand Media. Now if they would just remove Huffington Post from their index, we’d be all set.

I would have been even MORE pleased if the top
result for “content farm” were now “Demand Media”.

Let’s all take our hats off to Google for a moment for finally tackling the problem of their own crappy search results. If you have to do a lot of web research, you’ve probably noticed over the past few years that Google’s search results were getting spammier and spammier, thanks mostly to content farms like Demand Media, something we already belly-ached about a while back. Okay, now lets put our hats back on. Why did it take them so long to fix this? This was definitely a problem as long ago as 2006. It’s inconceivable that the Search Quality Team at Google hadn’t noticed it, and their recent fix seemed to come hot on the tails of the article by Michael Arrington on high-profile tech blog TechCrunch called Search Still Sucks , in which he said the thing many of us have thought for quite some time. So why did it take so long? The reasonable inference is that since Google’s largest revenue stream is ads, and content farms generated millions of page views with Google ad content, it would be a bit awkward to proactively blacklist them all. But that’s what Google has finally done; if you review lists like the ones at Search Engine Land and SYSTRIX, it’s immediately evident that the big losers in Google’s fix are mostly “Demand Media” sites. Which I find vaguely gratifying. If you’re not familiar with Demand Media, check out the PBS MediaShift series about companies like theirs. One of the most telling things about Demand Media is simply who the CEO is. While one has to acknowledge the drive and accomplishments of Richard Rosenblatt, about the only positive thing I can say about a guy who developed a company like MySpace is that he then managed to screw Rupert Murdoch by selling it to him for over half a billion dollars. In creating Demand Media, he’s shown that while he has incredibly savvy, drive, and management skills, he’s either entirely driven by the bottom line at the expense of any benefit to the human race, or utterly delusional. In this Business Insider piece about how Google’s algorithm change “hasn’t hurt their business at all” his EVP of Media and Ops says “We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer“. Yes Demand Media. I’m sure today’s consumer has been clamoring for more crap content to dig through to find any actual useful information. And while my greatest complaint about Google remains more about what I’d call their “imperial overreach” – in that their near-total domination as a portal to the web is the worst thing that’s happened to search in its relatively short history – we still have to give them an incredible amount of respect. The fact that you can dip into a global library of information and extract relevant information in seconds with relative ease borders on mystical. The unfortunate thing is that if we’re using a library as the analogy here, I think we now have the problem that everyone in the world is going to try to shove their book onto the shelves, and there are no librarians on duty, just an algorithm and an advertising department. A friend asked me the other day what I thought the solution to Google’s search problem was, and I said something I’ve said for several years when answering the question: “human edited content“. While the Open Directory Project (which was based on this concept) bit the dust ages ago from internal “link whoring” corruption, it doesn’t mean that the idea won’t work. Wikipedia is a great example of fairly reliable human-edited content. Why couldn’t this work with search? In any case, although I’m suspicious – as others are – of the continued presence of crap eHow.com content in results, I’m already relieved to see fewer “HubPages.com” and “Examiner” results. I just wonder if they’re going to fix that “bookmark site that links to a blog post that links to an article on HuffPo that steals an article wholesale from another site” problem.

Hmmmm. Upgrades.

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on February 13, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

We’re performing some long-overdue software updates today, so if the site is down, you’ll know why. Oh. Wait. If the site is down, you aren’t reading this, are you.

I haven’t had the greatest luck with computers recently. I spent the day after Christmas last year re-installing Windows XP with a thumb drive after a major data loss thanks to a dead hard drive. And last week, our hosting company had a pretty catastrophic upgrade problem that made for some misery all around. To their credit, they managed to remain courteous and communicative through the whole process, and things are mostly back to normal. Which is something I can’t say for many other companies I’ve worked with, so I still highly recommend them. To anyone who has to go through an ordeal like this, I’d like to share something insightful a fellow customer said on one of the support threads, which was: “By the way, encouraging people to bitch on Twitter so they can jump the support line is a really, really bad idea“. Now there’s some common sense advice. In any case, we’re doing some upgrades today, so if the site is down, that’s why. Oh. Wait. If the site is down, you won’t be reading this. Oh well, we’re hoping it goes smoothly, and if it doesn’t, we saw The Matrix Reloaded, so we know ways to deal with problematic upgrades. You just beat the crap out of them in bullet time.
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Thousands Of Dictionaries Die In Tragic Vocabulary Explosion

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on February 6, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

I went to the word doctor and he told me I needed a new Linguistic prescription, so I decided to stop procrasturbating and buy a new wiener filter.

What word lover wouldn’t LOVE a copy of
the OED? Well, me I guess. If it costs 1300
bucks and is obsolete by the time it ships.

Today I got an e-mail from a friend in which the word “empath” was used. The particular usage of the word in the e-mail highlighted something that I think about quite a bit, which is that the English language is probably more fun now than it’s ever been, even if we don’t know what we’re saying to each other. I’m referring of course to the fact that as the venerated Oxford English Dictonary dies slowly from self-inflicted wounds like including Homer Simpson’s DOH! in its pages, new words and axioms are appearing and disappearing so fast that on a regular basis, it can be hard to tell what someone is talking about. There have long been two basic schools of thought regarding how to go about defining words – in a nutshell, prescriptivists want to tell you how to use words, and descriptivists want to tell you how you are using words. It’s sort of like the difference between always adhering to the dictionary, versus being more willing to accept common usage. Which is why I’ve always found the existence of Common Usage Dictionaries to be a little problematic. In any case, neither of these schools of thought were of much use in addressing the word I mentioned at the outset. i.e.: empath. It presumably means someone who is empathic (or empathetic, if you prefer). But what does that really mean? If you take the word “empathetic” and its little friend “sympathetic”, you’ll find that the people who are most likely to be confident in their understanding of the two words’ meanings will in fact have the definitions reversed. Most educated people will say that empathy means that you can actually feel someone else’s feelings, while sympathy means that you can imagine how they feel. What do you think they mean? In point of fact, the word empathy was brought into usage in English in the 1880′s specifically to provide a word that describes a professional clinician’s need to maintain detachment while still truly understanding how a patient feels. See the yellow highlighted summary at the bottom of this page for further explanation. But that’s just two of probably hundreds (if not thousands) of commonly used words that are prone to misuse or open to debate. I’m surprised that they’re not on this Wikipedia List of English words with disputed usage. But those are slow-moving targets, much like the already-archaic term “politically correct” which enjoyed a mini-revival recently when hurled at Barack Obama by the Israeli press. But the real fun with the rapid evolution of our language is being driven by the internet, technology, and politics. In the case of the latter, GOP strategist Frank Luntz has brilliantly blazed new trails by understanding that it’s not what you say, it’s what people hear. His book Words That Work outlines how he helped the Republican party win repeatedly simply by, for instance, telling you to think about “personalizing your retirement plans” instead of “worrying about Social Security” . And regarding the former two influences – the internet and technology – we not only have a complex new world of devices and the behaviors that they drive, we have an incredibly rapid way to share the words being created to describe them. There simply is no way that a team of academics arguing about what to include in the next Oxford English Dictionary (only $1300!) can remain useful to us; probably the closest thing we have to a useful dictionary are sites like Urban Dictionary. Which is both scary AND fun, in my opinion. I mean, while we may not need words like procrasturbation, we may need words like Dykeadelic, because who doesn’t know someone who isn’t? And futronym will come in handy when we need to manage all the retronyms we haven’t created yet. Below are a few of my favorite recent words. Feel free to share any good ones of your own. And if everything I’ve said here just sounds like noise to you, maybe you should run it through your Wiener filter. You should have no trouble finding one; they’ve been around since 1949.

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