Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Random reading

Author sues over poorly copy-edited book [Charleston Post and Courier]
Leon Koziol, a former city councilman and candidate for state senate in Utica, N.Y., has accused Booksurge of outsourcing the editing of his book to India and delivering thousands of volumes with upside-down text and "words not found in the dictionary."

Shakespeare lines that are now cliches [The Shakespeare Book of Lists]
The old joke goes something like this: A guys walks out of the theater after seeing Hamlet for the first time. "I don't know why everybody thinks Hamlet is such a well-written play," he says. "It is full of cliches." Well, here is a whole list of cliches, along with where they originated.

Generic names for soft drinks, by county [PopVsSoda.com]
Do you say soda, pop, coke or something else? Eighty-one percent of the respondents in my Dallas County, Texas, where I live now, went for coke. In Sedgwick County, Kansas, where I grew up, 71 percent went for pop. Somehow, I say soda.

One, two, three and four spelling bee words were misspelled in newspapers [Regret the Error]
Sure, these are easy words to get wrong because they're so unusual. But the errors make us such easy marks.

Adios, apostrophe:The Internet is killing off punctuation it doesn't need [Toronoto Star]
Its? It's? '90s? One word, two? A hyphen? Huh?It's old, it's useless, it's annoying and according to one linguist, the Internet bell doth toll for the apostrophe, among and other arcane punctuation. "People are absolutely confused about punctuation, particularly about apostrophes," says Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of Alphabet to Email: How written English has evolved and where it's going. As if to prove the point, the publisher accidentally left out the apostrophe of the "it's" on one of the first drafts of the book jacket.

2 Comments:

At 1:22 AM, June 10, 2006, Blogger Thomas McAllister said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

 
At 1:29 AM, June 10, 2006, Blogger Thomas McAllister said...

If Koziol's account is true, we should all be appalled. Nevertheless, one still must ask why he would order a sizable second shipment before the first had even arrived. Oh, well.

 

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