Spam jam

Back from the beach – at last! – and it’s straight back to work. I’m now editing a bright new paper by one of my favourite professors who fully understands the importance of getting her charmingly Dutch-flavoured English onto the same level as her lucid research findings. It’s a joy to work for such a clever client and… Gracious! Did I just say “straight” in relation to “back to work”? Silly me (I can’t even think straight)(that’s the least of my worries). What a porkie pie! I should have said, “straight back to my in-box” for what else could you expect from an afficionado of Spam Lit?

Unfortunately all the antispam protection I’ve got rigged up on my computer leaves me with meagre pickings in Outlook, so before getting down to work in earnest (he doesn’t mind, really) off I whizzed to my webmail accounts. Gmail and Yahoo, as you know, intercept the outrageous in a timely fashion and dump it in their junk bins. Luckily for spamaholics, they leave this true blue stuff hanging round for weeks or don’t ever bother deleting it so that when I’m in the mood for some idle spamusement, like on my return from holiday, I can indulge myself and wallow in spamlets from here to spamernity.

To get your salt-encrusted brain back into shape after lolling about on the beach for too long, I can warmly recommend a good game of “spamogram”. It’s a little something I invented that combines the wild abandon of spam with the formal constraint of the lipogram (no, dummy, that’s not the same as sending a kiss by telegram)(and if you remember what a telegram is, you’re as old as I am) (no, older). Instead of omitting one letter, such as the vowel ‘E’ in a lipogram, my game finds its rigour in omitting everything bar one phrase of the spam message. String those abandoned phrases together in constrained sentences and hey presto, you’ve created an original spamogram, or as I like to call my results, spam jam! Here’s a couple of typical spamples:

Henrietta Hamper

Spam jam I
She arrived dressed in civilian attire. She wanted to know. My God, Genevieve. Did you fly in from 1958? Since my hysterectomy was delayed, I have grown to appreciate that death is natural and there is nothing wrong, but it is always different when it hits. Unstable organs happen in other disorders but the exact sequence of what’s happening here. Upon examination, a familiar aroma of baby powder was detected. Now I see it is obvious. They even took my Paxil. Those who jump off a bridge in Paris are in Seine.

Amazing, Margaret

Spam jam II
The march towards professionalism began with does the name Pavlov ring a bell? This is an especially urgent call at a time when many suspect we’re in the midst of a real estate bubble. So far, the season of the tight end stud has been large. But remember, no one ever won by standing still. You gotta move. As the year turns, add light and colour to your life. It’s the best. Here is a pick you can't afford to miss. Get in on this one before it explodes.

It’s not a joke

Forgive me for lolling in your face, but spam jam is guaranteed to get me giggling, much like those “poorly drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines” always break me out in hysterical ha-ha-ha’s. But I’m funny like that and then again, I suppose spam jam could be an acquired taste, much like Hormel’s classic SPAM®. (“Taste where it all started. The original flavor from 1937 that turned the world on its tongue.”)

Let me leave you now with those chaps from Monty Python whose sketch, history relates, is the origin of the modern usage of spam. But don’t blame these full Monties for starting the spamming lark. The real culprit, responsible for Opening Pandora’s In-box in 1978 is Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corp. An ad man, what else? Enjoy, and see you next week!

Nanoblogging

Here’s a riddle for all you brainiacs: Q. What is a banano?
A. Exactly the same as an ordinary banana, only one billion times smaller.
I know, banano, bah no-no! It’s one of my nerdier jokes, but after a long day’s editing of a long, long book (did I tell you this book is looong?) nano nonsense is all my nerdy birdy brain can come up with. So this week’s episode is going to be entertainment, short and sweet, and no harder on the brain than a… now tell me, what rhymes with sweet?

Talking of Twitter, have you heard about the two 19-year-olds at the University of Chicago who are retelling the Great Works of Literature in nano episodes 140 characters long. Their book Twitterature will be published in Autumn 2009. I read about it in an article by Jim White in the British paper The Daily Telegraph (my nice neighbour gives me his copy when he’s done with it and, as an incorrigible wordaholic, who am I to turn down this free read)(admittedly I skip the gory Tory bits).

The article is headed Bloke goes bonkers pursuing whale and in it Jim White has Twitterised some famous books. Here are a few of my favourites:

“Group of teenagers adopt incomprehensible jargon, drink milk and discuss Beethoven before terrorising the community. All society's fault.”

“Hero constantly spied upon by someone claiming to be older sibling. When he complains, finds himself with head in cage of rats.”

“Conscientious female farmer, ignoring claims of every decent bloke around, is seduced by disreputable soldier. Sheep don't much like it.”

“Wild-eyed, bushy-haired fellow on moors causes havoc with local females. If you haven't time to read it, listen to song of same name.”

“Sharp-toothed aristocratic night owl shows interest in local girls. Sales of garlic in nearby market go through roof. Stakes big seller too.”

Can you guess which books these Tweets refer to? Feel free to drop me a comment if you want to have a go at the answers. Which reminds me, someone called pedanticKarl left a nice comment on my post about about his favourite philologist, HotForWords (Sex symbol, June 4), otherwise known as Marina Orlova.

Back at the HFW site pedanticKarl noted my use of the friendly term ‘Dunglish’ which many language pro’s working in the Netherlands use to describe ‘English writing with a Dutch accent’. He suggested that Dunglish might be a candidate for HFW’s Nerd Word of the Day. I had a quick butcher’s at what has already been given the HFW nerdy treatment and really liked Weisure, a blend of work and leisure meaning free time spent doing work or work-related tasks, and Attachmeant meaning an e-mail you have to resend because you forgot to add the attachment the first time. This is something I have to do sickeningly often. If only the pain would fade faster than a nanosecond.

Which brings me neatly on to this Slate V mockumentary on the next big thing in nanoblogging. Have a look at...



Fluttery footnote
If you haven't got time to revise your text to fit in a Tweet, just 140 it and voila! These guys will do it for you. Ever wondered why texts are limited to 140 characters (160 actually; Twitter reserves 20 characters for the user's name). Find out right here.

Finally, here's one of the nerdiest jokes ever published by a British newspaper. The Guardian announced on April 1, 2009 that it had a "mammoth project under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

The article continues: "Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet."

Read the full story right here and don't forget to comment below if you know what the Tweeted book titles are. Cheers!

Brave new word

Have you ever been hit by a word that looks like it’s perfectly good English until you realise you don’t understand it? That happened to me the other day. I was surfing Cadrona snowfields high above Wanaka, my old hometown in New Zealand, when I came across this vivid report. An excerpt:

“The NZ Uni snow games was awesome fun. The results were wicked and the peeps and good times rocked harder and bigger than ever! The boardercross was in sweet shape and in the finals a wipe out lost my win and in the big air I stomped a sweet indy grab over the big table at Cadrona so I was stoked I even hit it, and then a shifty back one on the smaller table which I butt checked…but it felt mean. The pipe was super slushy but I was getting lofty on it and it was wicked to ride a pipe again!”

Peeps? Stomp a sweet indy grab? Butt checked? I can guess what the last one means (ouch) but the other terms go beyond me. Okay, it’s snow sport slang, and since I don’t belong to the in-group of crossboarders and their fans no one would expect me to understand it. It’s like the arcane jargonology philosphers use to exclude ‘the amateur riff-raff’, in the view of the former professor of cognitive psychology Steven Lehar.

Insider talk keeps outsiders out. But not me, or not for long if I can help it. I love brave new words to discover, and old words too, like the opposite of gazumping, which I tottered across while reading Country Life. My passion for seeking the source of the strange makes me fond of Wordnik, devoted to discovering ‘words and everything about them’. Wordnik gives real-time examples, like this gem from ozzieCousins on Twitter. “Twaddle is my word for today. It means: to tweet in the manner of a duck walking.”

Wordnik now contains more than 1.7 million words and 130 million examples, but alas, nothing on gazundering or, funnily enough, wordnik. To be fair, it does invite you to add new words and lawd-a-mercy on us language professionals, it lets you report a typo.

Reminds me of something else of interest to language pro’s: "Copy Editor's Revenge Takes Form Of Unhyphenated Word". Seduced by the revenge bit (if only), I clicked on the link before realising the headline belonged to a lofty story in The Onion. If you don’t already know it, this site is super slushy wicked!

That leads me to the stonkingly wicked comedian Catherine Tate and her Helen I-can-do-that Marsh translating CEO-speak in national stereotypes. Hilarious Hells will forgive you for thinking she’s talking English, albeit offensive English, throughout. Whatever. Is she bovver’d? Not!



Brave new exit
You know what? Aldous Huxley didn't make up Brave New World for the title of his book. He nicked the line from Shakespeare, that’s what, along with a Fordist factory full of sundry other quotes. Waaaaay back in 1978, I worked on The Tempest at the Sydney Opera House. The show was directed by Ted Craig, and it had Michael Craig (no relation?) as Prospero and Barry Otto in the cast.

These thespians are all still enjoying the juicy fruits of their careers. Even my fellow assistant stage manager, Nick Schlieper, went on to make an international name for himself as überkreativ lighting designer and winner of countless awards. He’s lighting up London’s West End at the moment with the fabulous Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Crikey! All this lovey talk makes me wonder how my life might have turned out, had I not had an attack of the Ethels (as in la Merman belting Anything you can do, I can do better) upon hearing that my ex-lover was heading for the louche lights of London. I might have stayed on in the theatre and become a Famous Director (sigh) but then the world would have been a language professional poorer and ye gads that’s enough blagging for one week. Let me really leave you now with a bonus vid on Priscilla’s brave new entrance to Auckland. It also gives you a game idea of what an assistant stage manager does. Enjoy, and see you next week!

Star track

Editing on paper, bah! Since I’m cack-handed (nope, it doesn’t mean what you think; check it out) my lousy handwriting has far more in common with a Jackson Pollack painting than the winning entry for a prize in penmanship. Perhaps I should have been a doctor. Then at least my pig pen would have come in handy for writing prescriptions. Luckily for my poor clients, the gruesome days of unruly writing are gone. Three cheers for on-screen editing. Now my corrections, revisions and comments are much easier to follow.

Thanks to Microsoft’s "Track Changes" I work in my clients’ Word docs with TRK turned on. I’m not the only trackie using this form of document collaboration technology. This is the world's most commonly used tool for tracking revisions in docs created by multiple authors. Automatically it marks every change or comment made with a name and the date and time so that all involved in the writing and reviewing process can see who did what, when, and in a fresh colour for each collaborator to boot.

But be warned, as with all information communication technology, GIGO rules OK. Don’t throw TRK in the garbage if you forget to delete a tactless comment before passing the doc on to the next person in the chain (bad), or back to your client (worse) or over to opposing counsel (worst). Legal horror stories abound [1].

My nastiest moment came the time I forgot to turn TRK on, only discovering this once I’d finished the work and had to send it off to meet the deadline. Of course I confessed this to the client, Fedde Jasperse, operations manager at Taalcentrum-VU, who soothingly reminded me that I could still track the changes I’d made with the “Combine Documents” feature. Thanks again, Fedde, and to borrow a famous phrase, deep joy!

Since I’m in a joyful mood I’d like to share a star trackie tip I learnt through Elisabeth Heseltine, a fellow member of the European Association of Science Editors [2]. Yes dear Reader, there are moments when it is wise to over-ride the name, time and date markers supplied by Track Changes. Let me hasten to add that I couldn’t find out why Professor Heseltine should want to change these markers. In my own case, I don’t need to alter the name except when I’m asked by an agency to work under their heading instead of my own business name, NEEDSer.

On the odd occasion, however, I prefer to keep the timing to myself, for instance if I'd rather not have it be known that I've worked through a weekend. Then I’ll do a Combine Documents just before delivering the work on schedule. That way all my changes and comments will get marked with the same time and date and I won’t risk my client getting (subliminally) tempted to think I make a habit of working unsociable hours. Do you think this self-protective practice is deceitful? Why? The client can still track what's been changed and that is what truly is important.

Talking of true, did you know that the most famous split infinitive in the galaxy nearly didn’t happen? Yes, really. The next to final draft of the very first episode of Star Trek had “...to go bodily where no man has gone before.” One of the writers caught and corrected that “bodily” but was careless in marking the insertion. So the person saddled with typing the final script put the righted word in the wrong place. This couldn’t have happened with Track Changes turned on. If you believe that, you’ll believe Mr. Spock had a bodily funny bone and could tell you I’m only joking. Let me leave you now with these four track stars in galactic harmony. Enjoy, and see you next week!



[1] What’s the most horrible thing that ever happened to you when you were using Track Changes? Feel free to post your star trackie bloopers in COMMENTS and give us all a fright!
[2] “EASE-Forum Digest: December 2008 to March 2009” compiled by Elise Langdon-Neuner in European Science Editing, Vol 35(2), May 2009.

Halley's comment

A writer likes nothing more than being read. And so do my chubby cheeks, like being red, that is, with the poignant flush of a bashful blush. Yes really, I'm still amazed, bemused, and captivated, still dazzled (I’ll spare you the rest of the alphabet) a whole week after being bowled over by a stampede of praise from a herd of business friends and relations, the recipients of last week’s NEEDSer Newsflash on the Bashful Blagger.

How nice to hear that so many of you read this blog and, dare I say it, actually like it. That made my day, so thank you foBBies (fans of Bashful Blagger), one and all!

My only regret is that all of you nice foBBies commented to me in private, by e-mail, which makes it hard for me to divulge, um, share what you said in public (well yes, there are limits). So do me a big favour. Please. Next time you feel the urge to interact, go to COMMENTS (click the link under any post). Who knows? If we all shared our views openly, we might get some open discussions going on here and wouldn’t that be fun! Don’t worry, you don’t have to post under your real ID, you can always put down A Non, or from Ur FoBBy, or use your own nick, Mick, whatever. Now that would be fun!

Since we’re still on the fun subject of crowdsourcing (um, are we? More like sourcing the crowd, if you ask me) (so who asked me?) you should know that SENSE is not the only place I go fishing for compliments, ahem, answers from my peers and superiors, as in "bolder and wiser" language professionals. On LinkedIn, I’ve got a public discussion opening up nicely on "realistic editing rates". I’ve asked: how many words can you edit in one hour? So far, for light proofreading, the going rate seems to hover around 8-10 pages (standard 250 words on a page).

For those of us lucky enough not to be dyslexic (lexic?) yet cannot count (like me) or, to put it more glamorously, have a light dose of dyscalculia (me two) (too!), this works out to 2000+ words an hour for some light proofreading. Funnily enough, this and other rates mentioned on LinkedIn for more complicated editing are similar to the results I got when I asked SENSE members the same question.

On LinkedIn, Susannah Driver-Barstow, a freelance editor at Prose Partner (greater New York area) put me on to the valuable editorial rate chart published by the Editorial Freelancers Association. Later on Susannah commented, “I do find EFA to be useful especially re the business side of freelance editing.” I followed the link and learnt that this “professional resource for editorial specialists and those who hire them” is packed with plenty of goodies open to the public. Check it out!

Talking of checking out, it’s nearly time for me to wend my way but before I go, did this week’s headline get you wondering, by any piffling perchance? We’ve all heard of Halley’s comet (due to swing past Earth again 52 years from now) but what was Halley’s comment and who did he say it to? Let me tell you: Edmund Halley (1656-1742) was an associate of Isaac Newton (1643-1727). One day (or night) Halley must have commented to Newton, “Come along old chap, publish or perish, pip-pip!” (or words to that effect) because without Halley’s encouragement and financial support Newton’s definitive work on gravity and other grave matters would never have seen daylight (or should that be starlight?).

So there you have it, Halley’s comment. Um, better not quote me on that. Let me leave you with a final note from Bill Hayley & the Comets, and dazzling footwork by Lisa Gaye & Johnny Johnston. Bill named his band after the royal astronomer, but obviously didn’t know that Halley pronounced his name not to rhyme with valley, or Bill’s name, but more like good lordy Ms Hawley. Hm… Hawley’s comet, doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Or does it? Are comments welcome? What do you think?

Emma Chisit

When I was six or eight or thereabouts my parents gave me a book. I forget what the book was called, something symmetrical like 1001 Answers to 1001 Questions, but I do remember that my addiction to questions was driving my parents nuts. They were probably hoping that giving me this compendium for curious kids would get me to shut up. Alas, it didn’t but I loved that very first reference book of mine for answering one thousand questions I hadn’t ever thought of, plus another one that I had thought of but hadn't found the answer to yet: What makes a blue sky red?

I love words as much as finding answers (esp. to unanswerable questions like, how fast can an editor edit?) and this makes me a sucker for the forum run by SENSE. I’ve talked about this trove for language fans before (Deep gobbledy joy) so you’ll know we tend to crowdsource serious questions on terminology and professional practice. But “Sensers” like a spot of fun as much as the next free lancer, so there’s space for the odd amusement as well, although I hasten to add that to keep the forum properly business-like we circulate the truly fluffy stuff via a Yahoo group called (wait for it) Non-SENSE.

A recent gem of forum amusement came from Kari Koonin, a specialist translator. Her post drew attention to the Pikestaff newsletter from the Clear English Commission which advises readers to “go easy on verbing nouns” and quotes from letters to the Daily Telegraph, including:
* Problems arise when people verbify a noun because they have forgotten that the relevant verb already exists. The result: being obligated to do things, [and] signaturing documents. (Tony Eaton)
* I have just been […] speaking to a man who told me what bus I would be on once I had "departured" from Taunton. (Meriel Thurstan)
Kari ended her post by commenting, “Signaturing? Departuring? The mind boggles. Sorry, must dash, haven't completioned my current assignment yet and the deadline's horizoning!”

On the more serious topic of terminology was a question headed To “the” or not to “the”? posed by Anne Hodgkinson of Rosetta Stone Translations, who specializes in the arts, especially music. Anne is about to proofread a book called Gamelan in 19th-century Netherlands and wrote, “I think there should be a ‘the’ there somewhere. Before I go so far as to say [that any] other possibilities are wrong, can anyone tell me if they really are?” Anne felt sure there would be a clear answer but, as she said in her summary of the answers, “There were almost as many opinions as replies” on the correct placement of “the” in a title of a book about the Dutch experience of Indonesian orchestral music. In the end, she went with Gamelan in the Netherlands in the 19th century.

Clearly there isn’t always an answer, right or wrong, to nitpicky questions of terminology, or any other question for that matter. At least on the SENSE forum we can tell when a question is a question. Not so for Monica Dickens during a book-signing session in Sydney in 1964. The famous author (great-grand-daughter of Charles Dickens) was scribbling her name in book after book when the next person in line said in a broad Australian accent, “Emma Chisit.” Monica duly dedicated the next book “To Emma” when the shopper stopped her. “Nah, I was only assking ya for the price of the book.”

This true incident inspired a witness, one Alistair Morrison, to coin the term Strine and publish Let Stalk Strine, a wonderful compendium of the whimsicalities of Australian speech, written under the pseudonym Afferbeck Lauder (alphabetical order). Let me leave you now with a lesson on local lingo for non-natives visiting Down Under. Catcha necks time!

Cryptic colour

Update: May 2, 2009. This episode was written and posted online in all ignorance of the tragic drama at Apeldoorn taking place at the same time. Dutch driver Karst Tates ploughed his car through the crowds in an attempt to attack the Dutch royal party, killing four people and injuring three times as many. To date the death toll, which now includes Tates himself, is seven people. I can't ignore what happened, but won't be deleting my post as it reflects the innocent fun Dutch people were used to having on Queens Day. Many of us in the Netherlands fear this innocence is gone for good.

Original post: April 30, 2009. Don’t tell me a Dutchman doesn’t know how to have a good time. It’s just not true, no mimsy doubt about that. April 30th is Queens Day in the Netherlands, a day off work and a national excuse for having a good time on a scale possibly unnerving to those from less Dutch-courageous countries. Or unnerving to those whose taste doesn’t run to an overriding passion for orange, the heraldic colour of the Dutch royals (House of Oranje-Nassau, which has its origins in the Principality of Orange) (which has its remains in modern-day Orange, a place in the south of France about 20 km north of Avignon and on average the warmest town around, temperature-wise).

You’re not wild about this hot colour? Then you’re done for when the heat of orange fever hits the Netherlands. You’ll be familiar with the sight at international football events: the not so huddled masses of the Dutch faction, oozing orange in a wildly creative assortment of silly hats and costumes. And on Koninginnedag too, all that wonderful silliness comes out of the orangery again, to be worn with pride and more often than not accompanied by the battle cry “Oranje boven!” (orange above) and a noisy hup-hup-Hollander polonaise from one pub to the next.

It ain’t new, I tell you. Jolly Hollanders have been hollering and rollicking throughout human history. They’re certainly not averse to a spot of hedonism, as droolingly described by this NY Times report from 1890 about a Holland Society banquet – addressed by Theodore Roosevelt, no less (you can guess where his family came from).

Actually, I’m glad that Dutch girls (and boys) only want to have fun because Queens Day really is. Fun. And divinely hedonistic too, though don’t blame me for your hangover tomorrow. It’s certainly not a day to be spent inside, posting a blog. Hence I’m outta here. I’m putting on my plastic orange top hat and I'm off to my village’s free market to see what treasures I can snap up from someone else’s trove, um, leftover junk.

But before I go, let me give you something to mull about at least. Did you know that orange is one of only two words in the English language that are impossible to rhyme perfectly (the other one is silver). It has half-rhymes, such as hinge, lozenge, syringe, flange and Stonehenge, but no true rhymes. Who cares, besides cryptic crossword fans? If you can’t find a perfect match, contrive one, the way composers Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel did in "Oranges Poranges", sung by Witchiepoo (Billie Hayes) on the show H.R. Pufnstuf. Enjoy this triple (Dutch) treat and see you next week!




 

Free booty

Back in the day when dinosaurs walked and I was but a lowly bottom-feeder – one of several assistant stage managers at the Sydney Opera House – one of my backstage cobbers dubbed me ‘Main Chance Werner.’

Ye gads! I’d been sussed! I’d believed no one could see my burning ambition and all the while it had been blazing in flagrante. To my dismay the nick caught on like bushfire and soon everyone was calling me ‘Main Chance’ at the Opera House, permanent crew and itinerant casts included. In my callow yoof, I was mortified and did all I could to live down the evil of being a so-called opportunist.

But today, looking back from the lofty height of experience I’d be more blasé. ‘What’s so fearsome about that?’ I’d say, referencing a famous ex-nun about to burst into song to boost her confidence. Doesn’t main-chancer mean I can spot an opportunity and am prepared to gung-ho for it? What an ideal entrepreneurial trait, especially when you’re marketing your own freelance business.

Which, of course, I am. Confirmed cave-dweller that I am, I prefer to do all my schmoozing online (okay, so I exaggerate) (only a bit) and forgive me, I’m still learning the ropes. So far NEEDSer is on LinkedIn, Facebook, Hyves, and Twitter, to name a few biggies, and just last night I main-chanced myself onto another two great-looking facilities for business social networking.

The first is Ecademy, London-based and with a global membership of 300,000. The Ecademy was set up in 1998 by Penny Powers and her husband Tom (one of Sir Alan’s original Apprentices). The factsheet says the Ecademy is a ‘networking tool for business people, especially home workers and business owners who can otherwise be isolated from the kind of contacts that are vital for propelling business forward.’ Sounds like the Blagger’s cuppa, doesn’t it? I signed up only hours ago, haven’t even finished my profile and already I’ve been courted by nearly 30 potential clients calling from as far afield as Alpharetta (in Georgia, USA) to Zurich. Watch this space…

The other site is part of the Envato network from Australia that was started by the brothers Ta’eed (Collis, Vahid & Cyan) in a living room back in 2006 and now gets upwards of 11 million pageviews a day for the whole network. FreelanceSwitch is a niche site offering all the information and support freelancers need. There are daily postings, chockablog full of useful topics like pricing, finding jobs, dealing with clients and daily productivity. And there are forums for crowdsourcing support and advice plus a resource section filled with knickknacks such as a rates calculator. Again, I’ve only been signed on for a few hours so I can’t vouch for how good the site is. But I’ve had a good first impression of its wealth of freelance booty.

That reminds me of a riddle: what’s the hidden link between freelance and booty? You don’t know? Well I’ll tell you. The origin of freelance is ‘free + lance’ (oh do keep up, please). ‘Lance’ comes from, um, ‘lance’, that weapon wielded by knights on horseback, like Sir Lancelot (no relation). ‘Free’ is not what our services ever should be (as some misguided clients seem to think) but comes from ‘freebooter’, which comes from the Dutch vrijbuit ‘booty’ and means a person who pillages and plunders, esp. a pirate. So there you have it. Once we were freebooting warriors, living by the might of our lance and sword. Today we’re freelancers, living by the wit of our mightier pen. All together now: aaaaahhhh!

Let me leave you now with a loving testimonial to a contender for the NoBull Prize, one helluva Holstein named Braedale Freelance. Here’s 211 glorious slo-mo seconds of Freelance’s second batch of daughters posing posteriorly to show us their udderly bewitching assets. Shake ya booty and see you next week!

Hermit age

You know the tired old sign that office jokers keep on their desks: "You don't need to be mad to work here but it helps"? Well, for me, “here” has to be “home”. Indeed, it would be sheer madness for this tireless joker NOT to work from home. I sure ain't good at the alternative. All that tweet and greet and blithering about the coffee machine in the corridor gives me the heebie jeebies. No offence intended, but I had enough of that social faffery in my corporate days to last me several lifetimes.

Let me socialise instead with the birdies gossiping outside my own window. I can handle their chirpy twitter and besides, the birdies never mind what I bleep back at them or even how I bleep it. So, does my desire to escape the madding crowd sound that mad? Nope, not to me, nor to many of my neighbours in Thesinge, the placid village we live in.

Really, we ought to rename the place “Hermit’s Hamlet”. For some strange reason, Thesinge harbours a wilderness of work-at-homes among its 700-strong inhabitants. Down my own sleepy lane, for instance, you will find (in no particular order) an accountant, a builder, a children’s book illustrator, an electrician, a health food distributor, a management consultant, a psychologist and a translator/photographer.

That’s nine hermits in a row (including me, your trusty language editor), although I hasten to declare that none of us actually occupies a grotty cave in solo splendour. We are blessed with socially outgoing partners who go out to work (and can be counted on to do all the housework whenever there is a deadline).

Gerard Kingma, friend and fellow language hermit, who lives at the end of the lane, does get out and about but that’s because he’s also a prize-winning photographer and has to. Obviously he can’t fob off his clients with the shots he's caught on his office webcam but rest assured, his snaps of the Thesinger Maar (the river flowing past his office) are as gorgeous as the works of art displayed on his wonderful travel & nature website.

The rest of us hermits, however, true to our reclusive nature, seldom are observed blotting the landscape or scaring off visitors, the task of the truly professional hermits employed on the fashionable estates of our Victorian forebears. Only a few of us would ever - except under duress or in unbearably sunny weather - poke a nose outside the comfy confines of our hermitages.

Talking of which, did you ever wonder how the moniker for a dank, dark grotto got to be given to that mega-museum in St. Petersburg? Well, stay put and I’ll tell you. When Catherine first began her great art collection she called the original gallery she had built to house it “my small hermitage” since only very few people would be allowed inside to view its riches. She once lamented in a letter that “only the mice and I can admire all this.” Thought you’d like to know that.

Ach, give Catherine the Great her mice, and her art, this hermit has her birdies and a great new age to enjoy. Yes, it was my birthday this Easter, and no, I won’t tell you how old I am. Suffice to say that I’d barely become a teen angel when this hit came out. Happy listening and see you next week!

Deep gobbledy joy!

Not so long ago one of my colleagues e-mailed the SENSE forum with a query about a copywriting term. “I need to crowdsource for this one,” she wrote. “What's the name for the key bit of text, often a direct quote, that you extract from an article and feature in a box?” As it turns out the answer is “pull quote” which sounds intriguing but isn’t what I want to talk about now. What really got my language cortex going was “crowdsource”, new to me but a term I supposed had been around for years. Google proved me right. There it was, defined by Grant Barrett in a New York Times column on the buzzwords of 2007: “Crowdsource ‒ to use the skills or tools of a wide variety of freelancers, professional or amateur, paid or unpaid, to work on a single problem.”

Wow, I thought. Crowdsource. What a good description of how the SENSE forum works. It’s so good I can almost forgive the word its gobbledygooky flavour. But what I can’t and won’t ever forgive is gobbledygook, for being what it is.

The G-word was coined in 1944 by one Maury Maverick in a memo banning "gobbledygook language" at the Smaller War Plants Corporation. Mr. Maverick made it up in imitation of a turkey's gobble in reaction to his frustration with the convoluted language of bureaucrats. So it's an American word but it has its equals in other languages including French (charabia), German (Kauderwelsch), Dutch (koeterwaals) and Italian (gergo incomprensibile). It's the converse of clear and concise, so confusing that no one can be expected to understand it.

Though I hate to admit it, it can be fun to play with, like on this Gobbledygook Generator presented by the Plain English Campaign, a UK organisation who have been fighting the good fight against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information since 1979 and who have some really good (free) guides to writing in plain English and handy (free) software like "Drivel Defence" to help you check for plain English in your texts (both docs and web texts).

Several other tools are available to evaluate readability, including the wonderfully named SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook), a formula that estimates the years of education needed to fully understand a piece of writing. It’s important to understand the issue of readability as it can have serious consequences. As Amy S. Hedman points out in Using the SMOG formula to revise a health-related document (American Journal of Health Education), “nearly 50% of American adults are functionally or marginally illiterate and lack skills to read and understand recommendations for preventive health, self-care and screenings, and treatment, thereby leading to poorer health outcomes. One solution to health illiteracy is for health professionals to … develop skills, strategies, and tools to ensure their messages are understood by the intended audience.”

Another solution, for all writers (not just health professionals) wanting to reach an audience, is to subject your writing (docs, web texts) to the pernickety pen of a professional pedant, a language editor who cares about the importance of clear communication and can help you to achieve it. Not that I’m plugging my own language editing service, of course, not (ahem). It’s just that I’d thought you’d like to know that on ReadAble, the readability test tool, NEEDSer scores an easy 8.7 on the SMOG scale, which means it should be easily understood by 12th-graders, that is, 17-18 year olds, my youngest clients. Needless to say (ahem), that goes to show I practise wot I preach.

Let me leave you now with a master practitioner. Rejoico! Stanley Unwin apparates in advertibold for Amstrad Wordyprocessor from approximilotions 1987. Featrisodes manily fantalistic wordings from the worldidode's grotelidiest linguabold. Deep joy!

Very Bunny

As Easter draws near it is time for my annual confession. Yes, dear Reader, I’m not Ragini Werner, your freelance editor and author’s friend who’s been faffing about online blowing NEEDSer’s horn to all and sundry (more sundry than all at this early stage). No indeed. I am in fact the Easter Bunny. You’d never have guessed it, but I do declare it’s true. I am the Bunny. Not just any Bunny, the Dutch Easter Bunny or Hare to be precise: Paashaas.
Perhaps I should explain, for those of us not bilingual. For starters, paashaas may look like one word but it’s actually two (the Dutch do this joining up thing a lot) (like the Germans do) (well, stands to reason, Dutch is a Germanic language). To un-Dutch eyes it may look like it but you don’t say paashaas like ‘pash-ass’ (as in: kiss my donkey with fervour). It sounds just like the open vowel of the plural of Dad (repeat after me: Papas) and the open (etc.) plural of laughs (say again: ha-ha’s). Now, join up the dads with the laughs and hey presto, you got it! Paashaas.

Moving on quickly now, paas also rhymes with the plural of Mum (see below) and even the planet Mars, but in that case only without you saying the ‘r’. Did you know Dutch spelling is very WYSIWY Hear and that’s really handy but o yea verily, don’t get me started on spelling, that’s a whole other kettle of vis. To return to our lesson: when you add ‘r’ to paas you get paars which sounds like ‘parse’ (I know it’s hard, but do try to keep up) and paars means ‘purple’ and as an adjective it gets inflected when placed before a noun (unless the noun is neuter). In short, I am the Paarse Paashaas, otherwise known as the Purple Easter Bunny. And that's definitive!

What’s that harrumph? Don’t tell me you’re not convinced. But Reader, my dear, it’s elementary (or alimentary considering how many chocky bunnies head down that canal come Easter time). I am positively, existentially purple. Long ago I settled into my purple haze. I love purple. Take a look at how I use it in this blog, better yet click over to the NEEDSer business site and check out the purple there. Any e-mail reader of mine can attest to my propensity for typing in purple (fittingly so, I always feel, considering my proclivity for purple prose). I could go on (and on) but let me rest my case: Purpurata, ergo sum. ‘Clad in purple, therefore I am.’

Thank goodness we’ve settled the purply bit. Yet how does that parse with the bunny bit? See here, snapped for your eyes only, your not so bashful Blagger caught snoozing on the job. Either that, or it’s my holier than a rabbit warren look. If this shock-doc depiction of me having a bad hare day doesn’t convince you, then I really don’t know what could.

And what’s all this got to do with anything important? Well, my babbling on about Dutch is not mere digression. It’s my mad March hare-y way of pointing you to the best guide for sorting out the quirks and oddities of ‘Dunglish’. Living in the Netherlands, as I do, I do lots of work for people who write English with a Dutch accent = Dunglish. My job is to edit out the Dunglish and to do that well I often dip into one of my favourite stylebooks: Righting English That’s Gone Dutch by Joy Burrough-Boenisch, linguist, editor/translator and fellow member of the Dutch-based professional association SENSE, the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors. Burrough-Boenisch may be writing on a serious subject, but she has a lovely light touch. Her puns still get me laughing, no matter how often I read them. Clear writing and clever wordplay, what more could a word-lover want?

I leave you now with Mama Cass Elliot, who (I am told) once told a reporter that prior to its release this hit song was nearly called Getting Bunny, Every Day. A case, perhaps of hare today, gone tomorrow? See you next week!

MONK-y Business

One of the capital pleasures of life as a language editor is the license it gives me to goof off on Google, or to put it in terms the taxman will accept: the time I spend online looking up terminology is justified. For sad nerdlings like the Blagger, badly infected with TICS (“terminally insatiable curiosity syndrome”), unravelling the hidden meanings of acronyms and other initial ISMS is more than a diversion. It is an essential life-enhancing element of my work. All of which is mere preamble to revealing what fun I had pottering in pursuit of the meaning of “CAP”.

Did you know that freedictionary dot com lists an incredible 252 definitions for CAP? (No silly, I didn’t count ’em.) The one I was looking up stands for “computer-assisted probing”. An example of this is to be found in a report about a new probe for performing brain biopsies. The developer, Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena of Imperial College London was inspired by Sirex noctilio, a wood-boring wasp that uses its ovipositor to drill into trees. The surgical probe reproduces the mechanics of the wasp’s drill (special shafts that move counter to each other) to displace and not damage tissue allowing surgeons to safely insert a hollow tube deep into the soft brain. The wood-boring wasp, by the way, is native to the Northern Hemisphere and was introduced into my native New Zealand as well as Australia, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and South Africa. Down south the Sirex is a real pest that attacks exotic pine plantations, causing up to 80% tree mortality.

And while we're on the subject of mortality, CAP is also “common Ada package”, a programming language developed by the US government commonly used in embedded systems (e.g. for air traffic control). Ada has nowt to do with the something-nasty-in-the-woodshed Aunt Ada Doom immortalized by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm, her parody of the rural novel and the funniest book I’ve ever read. The name comes from a picturesque character in computer history, Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), a mathematician considered to be the world's first computer programmer. Lovely Ada was doomed to die at 37, the same age as her father, the poet Lord Byron.

A clever CAP you might doff your hat for (or hoodie at least) is the clever little “capuchin”. These brave New World monkeys were named after an offshoot of the Franciscan monks, the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin who wear brown robes with capacious hoods over their heads. Capuchin monkeys are extremely intelligent (the monks, too, indubitably) and are used in laboratories or kept as pets (think: organ grinders). Some monkeys are even trained to help quadriplegics around the house much like mobility assistance dogs. They help out by doing such tasks as washing their owner’s face, and microwaving food and opening bottles. However, it seems these little helpers don’t always do well in this care-giving context as for safety reasons they often have their teeth extracted (wot?! in case they bite the hand that feeds… their owner!?).

But enough of monkey business and onto majuscule matters, to wit: CAP aka “uppercase”, known as such because ye olden loden setters kept capital letters in the upper drawer of a desk or in the upper type case. The Blagger is glad to announce that someone called Galahad is the gallant winner of the premier RAW award, being the first to report spotting the misspelt “Captial” in the YouTube lesson on text revision (see the episode dated March 12). Congrats ole Gal and I hope you keep on enjoying your prize!

If you want to know what a RAW winner wins, enter this week’s competition. This time the prize will go to the first reader to spot the word or words in this episode set in “camel case”. I leave you now with a capital performance (capital punishment?) by one nonplussed non-brunette in the American game show Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? See you next week!



PostScript
StudlyCaps, aka StickyCaps is what you call it when individual letters in words are capitalized at random or in a pattern. According to the Jargon File, “The origin and significance of this practice is obscure. It appears to have been popularized among adolescent users during the early eras of online culture, as a form of rebellion against the rules for proper capitalization of names and sentences.”
SO, tHere yOu have iT and WHat do You thiNk Of thaT?

Call My Blag

So sue me, I’m a blagger. What’s a blagger? I hear you ask. Well, it's easy to define. One dictionary of British slang (see below) says:
blag: (verb) wheedle; bluff; wangle: I managed to blag a ride to work. Or: I had no idea what I was talking about but I think I managed to blag it. Likely derived from the French “blague,” meaning a tall story. Americans use “mooch” and “moocher” in the same context.Wiktionary adds this helpful little note: (Internet slang) To brag on one’s blog.

So, there you have it, I’m a bragger ...um... blagger but, believe it or not, I’m also a bit of a bashful one, with an annoying thing for over-alliteration that’s going to drive you barmy if you keep up with this blog. But I digress. I mean, it’s one thing writing a blog to market my business. I don’t have any qualms about that, what-so-ever. I can blather on about NEEDSer till the cows come home and have gone to bed after being milked to udder satisfaction but as I said, that ain’t the problem.

After all, I stand behind NEEDSer one hundred percent, believe unstintingly in the quality and value my native-English editing service provides to clients. And if I ever do suffer a dose of self-doubt which, ahem, does happen, for an instant boost to my confidence I only need turn to the Warmly Recommended pages on NEEDSer to see what satisfied clients have said about my work (yes really! No one was bribed or otherwise hurt in the making of this business commercial ...um... blog).
No, NEEDSer is not what the bashful part of the blagger is all about. It’s me. Little me. Like Sally Field accepting an omigod-an-Oscar-for-me type of Little Insecure Me (or LIM, as in “going out on a LIM”). Will you feel it? Will you like... erm... this blog since it's going to be all or nothingly devoted to All About Me and my life in the fast lane of freelancing. Working from my office at home. In my pyjamas. Nyah-nyah-nyah.

Guess there’s no answer to that. Not yet anyway. Just have to wait and see and judge by your actions and comments if you rate NEEDSer ~ The Bashful Blagger as worth following. Please don't be bashful. Do feel free to comment and let me know what you think of this one and all subsequent posts (added weekly). Believe you me, at least one of us will be watching this space.

[UPDATE] The Bashful Blagger has pulled up sticks on Blogger and moved over to Facebook. Join us there for more fun, frivolity and wordplay with NEEDSer. See you there!