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News, culture, and politics. Not necessarily in that order.

 

Entries Tagged as 'Language'

A Note on the Text of the 10-Second Interview

Posted by Ocelopotamus on December 13th, 2007 at 12:33 pm

Grendel from Earthgoat, always an attentive and keen-eyed reader, has written to gently chide me for conforming to a certain lowbrow usage in my 10-Second Interview post.
The question in question would be this one:
Pepsi or Coke?
Iced peppermint green tea.
Since that post and its comments are a fair way down the page at this point, […]

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Tags: Culture · Blogs · Journal · Internet · Language · Restaurants · Cooking and Recipes

Roundup: Pink Elephant Edition

Posted by Ocelopotamus on September 10th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

General Petraeus says that “victory” in Iraq will require 9-10 more years. I’m trying to imagine how ten more years of bloody occupation can possibly work out to a victory. More on that subject here.

A bill has been introduced in Venezuela to restrict baby names to a list of 100 approved choices. “The bill’s ambition, […]

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Great Moments in Misplaced Modifiers

Posted by Ocelopotamus on July 13th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

Spotted just now in an online customer review for a handheld vacuum:
We have a 2 year old daughter who loves to throw food and her five cousins who ride in the car.
… those poor cousins, being thrown around the inside of a car by a freakishly strong two-year-old!
I hope the grownups at least keep the […]

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Tags: Culture · Internet · Language · Grammar

“Do Not Go To Work on an Egg”

Posted by Ocelopotamus on June 20th, 2007 at 10:48 am

A British advertising watchdog has slapped down the British Egg Information Service’s attempt to bring back the famous “Go To Work on an Egg” ads from the 50s, on the grounds that they don’t promote a properly balanced breakfast.
Something like the dawning American realization that the egg is indeed edible, but maybe not so […]

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Tags: News · Culture · Food · Comedy · TV · Language · Health · Advertising · Business · Animals & Environment · UK/England · Video · Vegetarian & Vegan

Roundup: Green Blood and Near Beer Edition

Posted by Ocelopotamus on June 11th, 2007 at 5:33 am

POLITICS: Department of things that should be perfectly obvious to everyone: Colin Powell says we should close Guantanamo. “Essentially, we have shaken the belief the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it and it is causing us far […]

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Roundup: Magnum Opus Edition

Posted by Ocelopotamus on June 4th, 2007 at 7:18 am

COMICS: For once I’m starting out with the comics section, in honor of the fact that Salon has added Opus by the mighty Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County, Outland) to their repertoire. Oh, happy day. Here’s the first installment. Along with my favorites This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow and Tom the Dancing Bug […]

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A Book That Will Live in Grinfamy

Posted by Ocelopotamus on May 25th, 2007 at 1:27 pm

This is a laugh-out-loud good time. Janet Maslin at the New York Times reviews the new book about Pearl Harbor (titled simply Pearl Harbor) by Newt Gingrich and his co-author, William R. Forstchen.
The title of her review? “An Assault on Hawaii. On Grammar Too.”
OK, I could have stopped right there, and that would have been […]

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Tags: News · Culture · Comedy · Language · Books · History · Journalism · Conservatives

Eight Tiny Buffalo Dancing on the Head of a Linguistic Pin

Posted by Ocelopotamus on April 7th, 2007 at 9:29 am

Thanks to a branching garden path of Internet posts, I have just discovered the wonderful sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” (which is really truly a grammatically correct sentence, although certainly not a graceful one) and spent about fifteen minutes learning how to decipher it. My head hurt for a minute or […]

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Tags: Culture · Language

News: Wear Sunscreen

Posted by Ocelopotamus on March 16th, 2007 at 6:40 am

Worldwide, the winter of 2006-2007 has been the warmest since record keeping began in 1880, according to a new government report.
A variety of desperate schemes to save the planet from global warming are being considered by NASA and other organizations — including a man-made volcano that spews sulfur into the atmosphere; a “sun shade” […]

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