nickromney.com

Via Mark Pilgrim, another site covering misused expressions:

Less refers to quantity, fewer to number. “His troubles are less than mine” means “His troubles are not so great as mine.” “His troubles are fewer than mine” means “His troubles are not so numerous as mine.” It is, however, correct to say, “The signers of the petition were less than a hundred, “where the round number, a hundred, is something like a collective noun, and less is thought of as meaning a less quantity or amount.

Leading to fewer errors.

yourDictionary.com has an article on 100 Most Often Mispronounced Words, which is from an American perspective, but interesting to see some of the back-formations (e.g. interpretate for interpret), metathesis (place-switching of sounds e.g. revelant for relevant)

Dunstan’s tale about being a Brit ordering food in the States made me smile a great deal. Seemingly a study was done about people believing the printed word (Holiday Inn used to have problems with guests staying past check-out time, until they put a notice on the back of the door. Stragglers staying past 12 noon were reduced to something like 2%). I’m similarly tied to the notion that a menu describes the totality of the fare on offer, but next time I order pizza in the States, I’ll consider ordering shredded salami, some mushrooms from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and some baked guava halves as well

During the BBC’s Big Read series, Phil Jupitus commented on the fact that Winnie the Pooh is only 15,000 words long. I found on Leon Fletcher’s page, “How Long”, that Hemingway wrote 2,000 words a day, and Robinson Jeffers just 14. I’m comforted by the knowledge that Flaubert wrote Madam Bovary in 250 words daily.

That is one of my goals for this site – to begin the discipline of writing 250 words (on any subject) per day, at least 4 days a week. I have no pretensions that any book I eventually write will have the same content as this blog, but if at least I’m in the habit of writing, then that surely will be one less hurdle on the road to publication. Am rather sobered in reading Gerry McGovern’s statistic that Printed content represents 0.003 percent of all content published annually in the world, but I am striving to equal AA Milne’s word length by the end of the year.

Phew! That’s a relief. I read Eric Meyer’s thoughts on Textual Healing, in which he was described as a grammar “Fuhrer” (sic). So, the gauntlet was thrown down, the stakes were high, and I headed over to Quizilla’s grammar quiz.

Am relieved to say that the verdict on my language skills was also:

You are the grammar Fuhrer. All bow to your authority. You will crush all the inferior people under the soles of your jackboots, and any who question your motives will be eliminated. Your punishment is being the bane of every other person’s existence, because you’re constantly contradicting stupidity. Everyone will be gunning for you. Your dreams of a master race of spellers and grammarians frighten the masses. You must always watch your back. If only your power could be used for good instead of evil.

Am now pondering whether to take issue with Quizilla that “Fuhrer” is diacritically impoverished (i.e. should be Führer). Reminds me of a few lines of dialogue recounted to me by my friend Matt Bradburn in which a man was accused of “pedanticism”. His only reponse to this was to say in hushed tones, “pedantry”. My thoughts exactly.

A sidebar to this article is when posting this, the accented “u” (which on my Windows keyboard is achievable through Alt+129) didn’t render as I would have wished (presumably utf-8 encoding is different), so off I went on a hunt for HTML equivalent characters, and found a very useful resource at starr.net. It turns out that the HTML markup is ü i.e. “u umlaut”, which brings me on to another diatribe from my soapbox.

umlaut is the German word for the English diaeresis i.e. a diacritic (accent) of two dots over a printed character. Dictionary.com’s definition is quite helpful. I can see that it is more often used in German that English, but not exclusively (e.g. the examples given in the above definition: Brontë and naïve). &udia; anyone?

In any case, the quiz is quite illustrative.

From “Daisy Roots” to “Vorsprung durch Technik”, a very useful site reminiscent of Brewer’s Phrase and Fable: Meanings and Origins of Phrases, sayings, cliches and quotes

I discovered this whilst browsing Roger Johansson’s site – 456 Berea Street

Writer’s Block guide to capitalisation.