Language

  • Much has been written about the importance of failure in design. To improve things we need to try new approaches which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Straight forward enough, at least to designers. But business managers won’t go near that. “Yes, I need to fail!” Bull-shit, you ain’t gonna hear that in many management offices.…

  • I finally got a around to reading Don’t Think of an Elephant! in which George Lakoff applies his linguistic and cognitive ideas on framing to American progressive politics. It’s a compelling, important book, and the theory can be used anywhere, particularly the hierarchy of vision -> values -> principles -> policies -> ten-word philosophy. It’s…

  • Terry just taught me clean washing greenwashing, which is when a company smears on the energy-efficient PR while continuing their old inefficient ways. And now there’s hygrid, a hybrid of electricity from the grid and rolling your own.

  • Chatting with some IAs recently, we wondered into grammatical territory where to my relief everyone felt passionately that it’s alright to end sentences with a preposition. One or two people said that was a rule carried over from Latin that shouldn’t apply to English. Winston Churchill illustrated the preference of comfortable convention over artificial rule:…

  • Lay and Lie

    Handy table.

  • A nice list… http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm

  • It’s a good thing the Germans know how complex their language is. They’ve invented two powerful tools to help learn it:The LEO English/German Dictionary can translate in either direction and the default setting is bi-directional, so you can type in either an English or German word and it’ll find the translation. This is only undesirable…

  • When shares of a company plunge on the New York Stock Exchange the trader responsible for that listing must buy into the selling, in their words, she must ‘catch the falling knife.’