The Red Jacket Diaries blog

Sue Horner is a freelance writer in Oakville, Ontario, who blogs about writing, newsletters, communications and running an independent business in The Red Jacket Diaries blog.
Dog with a rap sheet

Dog with a rap sheet

My dog is known to police. I found this out from a hanging door tag left by the local Humane Society while I was out. “Please call the officer below re: incident involving ‘Jake’,” it said. Uh oh! While I was away one weekend, Jake had stayed...

Can execs speak plainly?

No wonder employees find it hard to understand company “leaders” (the new word for managers, apparently). The latest “BigExec-speak” I ran into this week: Action as a verb, as in, “We’ll action those areas.” Ugh. Criticality....

Going through the wringer

What happens when a phrase references old technology? It becomes a prime candidate for being misspelled. I thought of this when spotting “put us through the ringer” in my local newspaper. The word should be spelled “wringer,” as in the old...