It’s Friday, and it’s the start of a long weekend (at least here in Canada). Seems like the perfect time for some word fun! Is it a piece of IKEA furniture or a type of cheese? An amusing quiz from Mental Floss. Thou wayward rump-fed malt-worm! Have some fun with the Shakespearean insult generator. Which [...]
Tag Archives: General nonsense
Friday word fun
TGIF! Time for a few minutes of seemingly mindless fun, with a secret learning component (thanks to Merriam-Webster and Oxford Dictionaries): Correct the malapropisms, where one word is used mistakenly for another, like “I was prostate with grief” vs. “I was prostrate with grief.” Make a word as fast as possible with the tiles given [...]
Punctuation challenge results are in
No doubt you’ve been breathlessly awaiting the results of the contest that marked the 2011 National Punctuation Day (Sept. 24) — the day for drawing attention to America’s lapsed grammar skills. Well, wait no longer! NPD founder Jeff Rubin has announced the select few among the 220 entrants who attempted to meet the challenge of [...]
Friday word nerd fun
Hey, it’s Friday. Time for some silly fun with words! Play Hangman with Oxford English Dictionary. No surprise, expect tricky words. Play Oxford Fortune Cookie on Twitter by tweeting “I want to play OxfordFortuneCookie with @OUPAcademic” and a number between 1 and 400. The reply will be a quote/your fortune. Build or test your vocabulary [...]
Best. Spam. Ever.
Thank goodness, Akismet keeps blog spam at bay. But every once in a while, I look through the spam holding pen to check out the most recent catches. I have to say, those spammers are getting quite creative, even if their grammar, excessive use of exclamation marks and the web addresses associated with their attempted [...]
A dark & stormy contest
I get such a kick out of the Bulwer-Lytton award, which challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The contest pays tribute to the famous “It was a dark and stormy night” opening of the 1830 novel Paul Clifford, by Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. The 2011 contest [...]
Get ready for National Punctuation Day!
If you are a word nerd and grammar geek, you probably notice signs in grocery stores that say apple’s instead of apples and cringe at misspellings and improper punctuation. So you may already know about and celebrate National Punctuation Day, which this year is September 30. Last year, the creator of this widely celebrated national [...]
Still room for odd book titles
The wonderfully quirky Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has a new winner: Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way, by Michael R. Young. The prize is given by British trade magazine The Bookseller, a leading trade magazine for the book industry with a website providing news and comment about the [...]
‘App’ makes Word of the Year
Those crazy word-nerds in the American Dialect Society have done it again, coming out with “app” as their Word of the Year for 2010. As even your grandmother probably knows, app is short for software application, and has gained particular popularity in the phrase, “there’s an app for that.” And there now seems to be [...]
Funny but dubious honour
Leave it to the British to give an award for Bad Sex in Fiction! The 18th annual (dis)honour, given out last night, went to Rowan Somerville for his novel The Shape of Her. Somerville won over the judges with phrases such as the one describing an act of lovemaking as being “like a lepidopterist mounting [...]