I thought I was being really clever combining the words procrastination and knitting to make "procrastiknitting" to describe the feeling of wanting to work on…
Continue reading → Not so clever after all. Darn.
∞If you've got a great story, poem or piece of creative non-fiction (i.e., essay, memoir or commentary) that needs to be read to be believed…
Continue reading → subTerrain’s Lush Triumphant literary contest: Deadline extended!
This has to be one of the coolest things I've heard of in a while: Amtrak is starting a writer's residency program. The deal is…
Vancouver, BC, has many spectacular natural sights. Views we have in abundance; go to any high place and you can gawk at the mountains, the…
“Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.” - Albert Einstein Two rays of light strike a surface at the same point, at the same time.…
Continue reading → subTerrain looking for “Coincidence” submissions
I thought I was being really clever combining the words procrastination and knitting to make "procrastiknitting" to describe the feeling of wanting to work on…
Continue reading → Not so clever after all. Darn.
∞There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
My good friends at Vancouver-based Subterrain magazine* are currently running a contest. Subscribe or renew before October 11, 2013, and you could win a very…
Editing and proofreading don't enjoy the glamorous image of writing. They're kind of like the siblings to the star. Sometimes you see a picture of,…
"Writing is starting." "Writing is finishing." Yay! Now that I have those two quotes down—I heard them somewhere and will check them later*—I have conquered…
And here are some other words I've been getting wrong! Thank you, Internet. Just deserts vs. just desserts - Grammarist. This website is all about…
Continue reading → Just deserts vs. just desserts and other expressions I thought I knew
Though I consider myself a pretty good speller and perceptive picker-upper of words, the connection between spelling and pronunciation of "segue" -- meaning to make…
Continue reading → Things no one tells you: How to pronounce segue
∞There it is. I'm going to open up. Sort of. No, I'm going to try. I consume too much media and write too little of…
The European horsemeat scandal got a little too close to home with the news that Swedish meatballs sold at IKEA stores in Europe were possibly…
The word nerds in my Internet circle were buzzing last week about this College Humor article about eight new punctuation marks we could really use.…
I was editing an article recently, and something about it was bugging me. I thought about it and then I realized that it was the…
Continue reading → The easy way to avoid bias in your writing
The other day on the train, a woman across the aisle dropped her book, and at a glance, you could tell it was of the…
Continue reading → E-books for the ladies of the world
∞Will Edit for Food has now ended, but I'd just like to thank everyone who supported the project - whether by tweeting it out, making…
Some of my favourite jobs have come via Craigslist, but it seems there's yet another scam for potential jobseekers to be wary of: the Personal…
Continue reading → It came from the Internet: the Personal Assistant scam
The Oxford English Dictionary was arguably the first example of a work created by “crowdsourcing.” As I learned from Simon Winchester’s book, the Professor and the Madman, on the relationship between the editor of the OED and one of his most enthusiastic amateur contributors, the dictionary was created through both mass collaboration and meticulous editing. And now, in a major update, they’re doing it again. *Dusts off research hat …
The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary want your help in tracing the history of particular English words and phrases.
What’s old is new again. In 1859, the British Philological Society launched an appeal to the British and American public “to assist in collecting the raw materials for the work, these materials consisting of quotations illustrating the use of English words by all writers of all ages and in all senses, each quotation being made on a uniform plan on a half-sheet of notepaper, that they might in due course be arranged and classified alphabetically and by meanings.” The society’s goal was to create a new dictionary “worthy of the English Language and of the present state of Philological Science.” (The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Simon Winchester, 1998)
The result, after 50 years of toil and tens of thousands of quotation slips? The Oxford English Dictionary.
The philologists…
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For donations to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society, that is! Because being a starving freelancer is a myth, but 25,000 hungry people (almost half…