Here are some of the interesting and funny words I’ve run across recently. Most are from Buzzwhack and urbandictionary.com:

• Academic junk food: College courses with no value other than being an easy way to get an A.
• Anticipointment: The feeling you get when a product or event doesn’t live up to its own hype.
• Ghost work: The workload absorbed by the surviving staff after a layoff, generally with little notice or proper training.
• Golfmail: The result of forwarding your office phone, email etc. to your cellphone, allowing you to play 18 holes while maintaining the illusion that you’re at your desk.
• Premature officiation: When the hockey referee loses sight of the puck momentarily and mistakenly blows the whistle to stop play.
• Rebound job: A job you take, often due to the loss of your old job, knowing it isn’t long-term.
• Reinventing the flat tire: To make the same mistake already made before, despite extended debate and a formal vote.
• Scooby snacks: Token compensation, usually non-monetary, given as an award. From the cartoon Scooby-Doo.
• Urban Amish: A city dweller with no cellphone, no laptop, no iPod, no BlackBerry…

What fun words have you seen lately?

Ontario and British Columbia are getting a new Harmonized Sales Tax, or HST, on July 1. The HST replaces the Goods & Services Tax that I now charge, so this will affect me. So I signed up about a month ago to receive technical bulletins from the government that would tell me things I might need to know.

Or not. The one today, on “Temporary Recapture of Input Tax Credits in Ontario and British Columbia,” summarized its contents in 105 words of dense governmentese!

Let’s see, how many of us can easily understand a sentence like that? 100% of readers can usually understand a sentence of eight words, according to the American Press Institute. (I couldn’t find a link to the study itself, but author and writing coach Ann Wylie references it.) Only 0-9% can understand a sentence of 43 or more words. I think we can guarantee that not many people will understand this without reading and re-reading it many times:

From July 1, 2010, until June 30, 2018, with the introduction of the HST in Ontario and British Columbia, large businesses – generally those making taxable supplies worth more than $10 million annually, and certain specified financial institutions – will be required to repay or “recapture” the portion of any available input tax credits (ITCs) that is attributable to the provincial part of the HST that becomes payable, or is paid without having become payable, in respect of a specified property or service that is acquired, or brought into one of these provinces, by a large business for consumption or use by that business in those provinces.

Faced with an indigestible paragraph like this, the writer/editor who wants to be kind to readers will use these tools:

• Break the paragraph into shorter sentences.
• Focus on one thought per sentence. For example, move the explanation of a large business to a separate sentence.
• Use smaller words.
• Replace phrases like “in respect of” with simple transitions, like “for.”

Fortunately (or unfortunately, looking at those lost millions), I am not a large business, so I don’t have to understand that lengthy sentence, or the 28 pages that follow it. For the real scoop on what does apply to me, I’m attending a session tonight put on by the Halton-Peel Communications Association. You can be sure we won’t hear any 105-word sentences.

Tell me you do this, too — as you flip past the newspaper section containing obituaries, you can’t help but stop and read the ones accompanied by a photo of a young-looking person.

Here’s why I do it. Having lost a few friends to cancer, I feel compelled to find out if that’s what ended the lives of these young people. And so many times the obituary does read that the person died of cancer. Inevitably, it’s after “a long battle” or a “courageous battle” with cancer, or sometimes it’s a “short but courageous battle.” Always a battle; nobody goes gracefully, although sometimes they are said to be “at peace” or “surrounded by loved ones.”

I don’t know why this concept of a battle bugs me, but I’m not alone. An empassioned column about cancer in the New York Times shares that dislike. In “Let’s face it: Words are inadequate,” Dana Jennings writes:

“We like to say that people ‘fight’ cancer because we wrestle fearfully with the notion of ever having the disease. But after staggering through prostate cancer and its treatment — surgery, radiation and hormone therapy — the words ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ make me cringe and bristle…It pays to have a positive outlook, I think, but that in no way translates to ‘fighting’ cancer. Cancer simply is.”

Last fall, after losing another friend to cancer, I wrote a post about how we can support friends who are going through the awful treatment for this disease. Dana says this:

“When I was sickest, most numbed by my treatment, it was more than healing to bask in a friend’s compassionate silence, to receive and give a hug, to be sustained by a genuine smile.”

In the comments to Dana’s post, three of the “top 20 statements people with cancer want the rest of us to know” are these:

• “Telling me to think positively can make me feel worse.”
• “Hearing platitudes or what’s good about cancer can trivialize my feelings.”
• “I need you to listen to me and let me cry.”

His is a touching and heartfelt article; do read it. And let’s not talk about battles any more.

Thanks to Patti Digh and her inspiring 37 Days blog (“What would you be doing today if you only had 37 days to live?”) for pointing me to Dana’s column.

To wind up the work week and provide some amusement for word nerds, here are a few errors spotted recently in print or online, some of them in places where someone really should have known better/proofread:

• …wore a vile of her blood (vial)
• …balling her eyes out (bawling)
• …his behaviour won’t phase people at all (faze)
• …gain piece of mind (peace)
• …these women will somehow reign them in (rein)
• …the quaint essential picnic (quintessential)
• …getting great clients…alludes many freelancers (eludes).

On the other hand, I also spotted some great invented words:

• Microvisit: stopping by to talk to someone for 140 seconds or less (Urbandictionary.com)
• Uppercase voice: to raise your voice or accentuate part of a sentence to stress significance, as you would when typing (Urbandictionary)
• Zerotasking: to do nothing or have nothing to do (Buzzwhack.com).
• Reinventing the flat tire: to make the same mistake made before.

Be careful out there, people! Spelling matters, and so does the right word.

Among the many sports my family watched during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics was one that vividly reminded me to watch out for jargon. I’m talking about curling.

I’ve never curled, so I found the unfamiliar lingo quite confusing. The commentators talked about a runback double, draws and takeouts, a shot rock and a hammer, and on the button. Then there are the near constant shouts of “Hurry hard!” and just “HARD!!!!”

You’d think, having a large audience for the Olympics not necessarily familiar with the sport, there would be more of an attempt to explain. There wasn’t, or maybe they explained things early on and expected everyone to keep up. Or maybe the important fact (for Canadians) was that the men’s team won gold and the women’s team won silver.

The curling-speak reminded me of the value of watching out for jargon in employee communications. Often there’s an assumption that “everyone knows” what a particular term means, or maybe it’s been explained once or twice before and that’s considered to be enough. I don’t buy it. Many times I have asked someone to explain a term or what some initials stood for, and the employee doesn’t know, or can’t remember. So I like to explain uncommon terms, or better yet, use familiar words.

This week, I was applying that thinking to two projects involving information technology. Tech types never want to launch or introduce something when they can implement or deploy it. They are all about the impacts and solutions, and other special jargon. But I did my best to frame the projects in more common terms that would be understandable to non-tech readers. It’s always worth a try!

I wonder…if I succeeded with both, would that be a runback double?

It’s National Grammar Day today.

Read up on grammar myths, send an e-card, have fun with grammar and more with Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty here.

And be sure to go forth and write well!

While celebrating Christmas with family in a small Ontario town this past weekend, I ran across countless examples of misspelled signs, inappropriate use of apostrophes in what should have been plurals, random capitalization of Important Words and other affronts to word nerds. Sadly, I did not have anything with me to capture them for your amusement. But here are some other random misspellings from my “glad I didn’t let that one go” files:

• the shear volume of information (sheer)
• tighten the reigns on spending (reins)
• can eek out a competitive edge (eke)
• additionnal information (additional)
• allows buyers to peak inside (peek)
• wheel barrels (wheelbarrows).

And lest you think I only look with a critical eye, here are some examples of expressive writing that I found delightful:

• “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” – Nicholas Carr in Is Google Making Us Stupid?
• “Occasionally I’ll either be tuned into my local NPR station, KCRW, at exactly the right time…or I’ll fall down some Internet rabbit hole…” – Colleen Wainwright
• “Mostly, I herded actors from room to room — I was a border collie for the comely.” – Quinn Cummings in Notes From the Underwire (a funny book, by the way).

What amusing, enjoyable or painful writing have you seen lately?

It took a while, but I encountered the first instance of “holiday season” in a client’s newsletter I edited yesterday. This phrase drives me crazy, whether or not it is accented by unnecessary capitalization as Holiday Season. Winter is a season; so is spring. Christmas (and the ensuing holiday) is not a season, even though advertising that starts before the Halloween decorations are put away makes it seem so. So please, can we just say “holidays” rather than “holiday season”?

By coincidence, I recently ran across humorist Dave Barry’s funny take on the holiday season (thanks to Wendy Marlow), from Christmas Shopping: A Survivor’s Guide:

“In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukkah’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!’”

While trying unsuccessfully to find an online link to it, I came across this one, which reminds me of attempting to shop at a mall near me anywhere near Christmas:

“Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around a parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space.”

I hope you enjoy the laugh, and the “season”!

Here’s some more expressive writing.

Love Letter is a public art project in Philadelphia consisting of a series of 50 rooftop murals painted by local and international artists. The project began in August 2009, and is described this way:

The murals, which are best viewed from the Market-Frankford elevated transit line, collectively express a love letter from a guy to a girl, from an artist to his hometown, and from local residents to their West Philadelphia neighborhood. Love Letter, which will be documented in two books, a film, and a gallery exhibition, speaks to all those who have loved and for those who long for a way to express that love to the world around them.

For example, one mural says, “Forever begins when you say yes.” Others say, “Miss you too often not to love you” and “Look look look look any way as long as it’s at me.” (See them all here.)

For writers, it’s a reminder of how the words we choose can say so much.

For the romantic, well, it’s another excuse to admire expressive writing (like Other People’s Love Letters)!

(Thanks to Patti Digh for tweeting about the project!)

Time for a reminder to be careful out there, as we look at some of the recent errors spotted in our imperfect published world (because, of course, I am perfect and never make any myself)*:

…the pictures of the bloggers…don’t wreak of the standard sales pitch (I think it means reek)

…the project would not be aloud to proceed (allowed)

…some sight the figure as high as 41 (cite)

…you can eek out six or eight minutes (eke)

…I don’t want to temp fate (tempt)

…we spend the evening with hot totties (toddies)

…do we tow to a version of that old line (toe).

As I said, be careful out there, and watch out for “spelling by ear,” as wordsmith and columnist Alden Wood used to call it.

*Joke. I do, although I try very hard not to.