You?
So right now there's a Nerd Quiz floating around the Off-Topic end of Notebook Forums. The highest so far has been a score of 85, I got 65 myself.
One particular member of Notebook Forums isn't that great at spelling. In fact he's downright terrible. More or less he is the antithesis of a dictionary.
He took this test, and scored a 52.
Wait, no, he didn't score at all.
As he put it, "Well FOOK I scoured 52."
Scoured.
As in, "To clean, polish, or wash by scrubbing vigorously" according to American Heritage Dictionary.
A far cry from scoring, I think. All the result of one simple, extra letter.
Tags: anecdote internet words
?!
This was actually shown to me a few weeks ago, and I had intended to write about it then, but I didn't, and it got passed over for a while.
Occasionally a sentence can be both a question and an exclamation at the same time. To signify this, these sentences are usually ended with both a question mark and an exclamation point. Apparently, though, a punctuation mark was invented to merge them together, called the Interrobang.
That probably won't show up unless you're using Unicode fonts in your browser, because its not a standard ASCII character. In any case, its a rather handy symbol, and a shame it doesn't get more use.
Tags: linguistic typography
Then There Was Than
As if a sign of how prevalent mistakes are in our language, the How-To of the Day a few days ago was How to Use Than and Then.
Good advice, they aren't really that hard to get correct.
Tags: internet linguistic words
Gone, But Not
The song echoed through his mind
He hadn't known him that well,
But the memories of others soon rose
It all began to blur together,
Until it mattered not how well he was known
The words of the bard echoed, as the song started again
"And so departs another soul,
Honored, forever, not to pass into the shadows"
The people he had known, the friends long had
It didn't matter who any longer
One gone, another gone
He had known them all, so they could not be forgotten
The song played once again,
And again he was touched
"Farewell," he said,
"You will not be forgotten."
Tags: music new_alexandria regularspelling writing
Letter Order
TIP: When abbreviating, the abbreviations come from the first letter of each word, in the order that the words are provided.
Thus, the following line, which I just set as my work MSN comment, is incorrect:
"OPMP - The Outbound Movie Poster Project"
Yeah..... slight problem there.
Tags: anecdote words