Edit Pass

I'm beginning to feel that I exist solely to provide links to Language Log posts. Nevertheless, see a recent Language Log post in response to John MacIntyre's cleverly titled That Which We Dispute, and MacIntyre's follow up The Day After.

Related to recent amusement on the Cupertino effect (spell-check mishaps), Language Log has some great examples of "incorrections" caused by well-meaning bulk changes gone awry.

The other day I happened to notice an odd sentence in a Seattle P-I article, where "misplace" seemed to be substituted for "My Space." I noted it to some colleagues, including Mike Pope, and he did a blog post on it. This, in turn, got picked up on Language Log, and has now attracted a guest post from Thierry Fontenelle of the Microsoft Natural Language Group. Looks like the Office Natural Language Team Blog is a place I'll be monitoring from now on. Word geeks, step away from the keyboard.

This might not go down as famously in history as Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" or Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," but it's pretty good fun (via Language Log).

The Grammar Lesson, by Steve Kowit

Another amusement: compare and contrast the corresponding lines from Thomas and Kowit:

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. |  The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz.

"Information architecture at its best is not about the cool, the newest, or the latest. Information architecture is about the breath, the pause, the stillness in the eye of the information hurricane." Grant Campbell has posted a great Boxes and Arrows article called Being Shallow. It's about information architecture's bad raps. But it's also a great "think piece" about centeredness in a decentering world. Check it out!

This just in: GSA official uses the term "hortatory subjunctive." Ably related by Jon Carroll.

Miro Adamy has a blog entry on the shortcomings of the .NET Framework class library documentation on MSDN. See the posting and comments here: MSDN Documentation - the worst in class ? As it turns out, solutions to the majority of the design complaints are in the process of being addressed; if not for the 2008 release, then for the next one.

Polyglot Conspiracy has come to the defense of the April 28 Unshelved strip, which got gratuitous criticism from the Language Log. I don't have much to add to the defense except "right on; me too." It was a great strip, and I also don't get the criticism.

Machine translation may be improving, but it also still provides amusement. For an entertaining recipe for pasta with clams, see Jon Carroll's April 27 column (starting in the fourth paragraph). 

OK, I can't resist blogging this one. In The Legislative Apostrophe, Nancy Friedman relates a current controversy about whether or not the possessive of Arkansas should be Arkansas' or Arkansas's. A state rep is all fired up about the "sibilant 's' that really fires him up." Hello?! The 's' is silent! When it becomes possessive, just use the 's' that's already there, I say.

Kansas's, sure; but let's go with Arkansas', please (Clarence Thomas's opinion notwithstanding).

This is so great! Take a look at The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary from theOfficeLife.com. Courtesy of AwayWithWords (which also has some highlights). I'm enthralled by "homing at work."

Jeff Atwood has collected some good quotes, including one from DevDiv's own Mike Pope, about the importance of documentation. Also many good comments that have additional interesting points. I particularly enjoy the excellent rant about hardware documentation that includes pages and pages about connecting the cables, but nothing about anything you'd need help on. I wonder how much of our API documentation falls into the same trap: document in great detail the things most people will already know, and skimp on the hard stuff because, really, we don't know how it really works until it's too late to document it.

Nancy Friedman, a California marketing "wordworker" by trade, has an interesting blog called Away With Words. It often has stuff near and dear to editorial hearts. A recent post points to the Slate podcasts on coroporate euphemisms (my favorite, which I hadn't heard before, is "eternity leave" for "fired"). A while back, there was a nice item on "passion." Many other amusements from time to time; check it out.

someone always there
not there anymore

I've recently reconverted from a content architect to a technical editor. I'm still involved in the design of the reference documentation for managed types. So I've retitled the blog to reflect the main focus, and I hope to be posting items on editorial and doc design more often (that is, more than once every couple of months).