Refenestration Daily.
From Word Spy’s mailing list is today’s coined-word of the day, corporate anorexia:
A business disorder, marked by an extreme fear of becoming inefficient that leads to excessive cost-cutting to the point of serious loss of business and sometimes bankruptcy. […]
I can relate to that one ;).
I enjoyed this quote from Lewis Thomas on semicolons, from today’s WordSpy mailing:
“I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.”
—Lewis Thomas, American doctor and essayist, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
I like today’s Buzzword of the Day, from Buzzwhack’s Buzzword-of-the-Day mailing list:
yogurt cities: Cities with thriving “active cultures” — museums, symphonies, opera, independent bookstores, etc. — where baby boomers will choose to retire (instead of retirement communities).
I don’t know if that reflects my retirement plans, but I like the word (well, phrase) anyhow.
On the American Dialect Society's mailing list, someone posted this story from The Onion:
William Safire Orders Two Whoppers Junior
NEW YORK — Stopping for lunch at a Manhattan Burger King, New York Times ‘On Language’ columnist William Safire ordered two “Whoppers Junior” Thursday. “Most Burger King patrons operate under the fallacious assumption that the plural is ‘Whopper Juniors,’” Safire told a woman standing in line behind him. “This, of course, is a grievous grammatical blunder, akin to saying ‘passerbys’ or, worse yet, the dreaded ‘attorney generals.’” Last week, Safire patronized a midtown Taco Bell, ordering “two Big Beef Burritos Supreme.”
To which one poster, not realizing the satire, replied in seriousness:
But of course the back-to-back sibilants in Burritos Supreme would probably not be heard as pluralizing the noun, so Safire might have been heard as “talking funny,” i.e., not marking the plural after a quantifier (ESL speakers do this all the time).
Heh. (and I'm guessing that ESL means “English as a Second Language” in this case)
The e-mail discussion list for the American Dialect Society offers this description for a food apparently known as a “Juicy Lucy”:
Juicy Lucy—This is a cheeseburger, but with the cheese inside the burger. It appears to be the product of Matt's Bar, 3500 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis, MN, but several other places in that town also offer it. Not recorded in Mariani’s Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink or in DARE.
To be honest, the idea of having cheese inside my burger initially sounded a bit gross to me. But, perhaps I was just thinking in an American-cheese state of mind. And, come to think of it, I would imagine that a “Juicy Lucy” made with blue cheese could be quite delicious!