While I’m not an expert handyman, I don’t mind trying to fix things around the house (except electricity – no, thank you). My skills are such that I’ve occasionally hit my thumb which invariably elicits a yelp swear word from me. Over the years, I’ve wondered why I feel better after the outburst. Does swearing…
On Thursday June 1, while many Californians – including me – were watching the Golden State Warriors defeat the Cleveland Cavaliers in game one of the NBA Finals, Ananya Vinay, a 12-year old from Fresno California, correctly spelled ‘marocain’ to win the 2017 Scripps National Spelling Bee. I might have guessed the correct spelling for…
Almost immediately after I wrote my post on heteronyms – words spelled identically but with different meanings and pronunciations – I got an email from a reader suggesting I write a follow up on homophones. She pointed out homophones are much more difficult for non-native English speakers. My reader’s logic made sense. Because heteronyms are…
Longtime readers of my blog know I find ideas for blogs everywhere, from psychology experiments to work events to the origin of words and phrases. Lately, however, books have become my primary source of inspiration. In fact, it’s not uncommon for me to have multiple blog ideas after reading a book. That was the case…
More than six years ago, I created a wordle of my 10 most popular blog posts. Back then, word clouds were relatively new and I thought it was an interesting way to explore what I had been writing about. Some words were expected – performance, scorecard, objectives, strategy, metrics. Others were a bit more surprising –…
Right after the SF Giants won the 2014 World Series, I tweeted the following: Tens of thousands of words will be written about this #WorldSeries. The only ones that matter: #MadBum MVP #SFGiants At the beginning of the post-season, very few people expected the Giants to win. Consider the situation at the time: The Giants…
You say you want a revolutionWell, you knowWe all want to change the world Many readers will recognize these lines as the opening to the Beatles’ 1968 song Revolution. More than just a catchy tune, the song is notable because it was the first time the Beatles expressed political views so publicly. We might all…
Unless you have a software background, you’ve probably never heard of longtime Python coder Tim Peters. In Zen of Python, he suggests 20 design principles including: How is “complex” better than “complicated”? After all, their dictionary definitions are similar and they are listed synonyms in the thesaurus: Since I love writing about words and word origins, I decided to dig…
For Scotts Miracle-Gro, social media has proven to be an effective brand fertilizer. According to Beth Dockins, director of customer service, many of the company’s customers prefer to tweet or Facebook a picture of their issue over having to talk about their lawn problems on the phone. But social media can just as quickly open…
In a recent post, I urged CEOs to view marketing as a strategic partner, the glue that binds the different parts of an organization together to deliver a consistent, cross-channel consumer experience. A 2012 report from Forrester and Heidrick & Struggles concluded that marketing is “moving from the outskirts to the core of the enterprise”…