by Sue Horner | Jan 13, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
You’d expect a “word of the year” to be something special, wouldn’t you? So it’s somewhat disappointing that the American Dialect Society’s word of the year for 2008 is…drumroll…bailout. Even Grant Barrett, chair of the...
by Sue Horner | Jan 1, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Happy new year! Word nerds enjoy this time of year, when various dictionaries and other authorities name top and top 10 words: Merriam-Webster lists bailout as the word of the year for 2008 after it received the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online....
by Sue Horner | Oct 28, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I’ve written before about the delightful column in The Atlantic where Barbara Wallraff posts reader requests (and ideas) for words that don’t exist but should. I didn’t realize that she also has a book called Word Fugitives until my husband, knowing...
by Sue Horner | Oct 20, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Astrologers who find new stars get their discoveries named after them; so do researchers identifying new diseases. Did you know that there is at least one writer who has been similarly recognized, although for a practice rather than a discovery? I had never heard the...
by Sue Horner | Oct 9, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
This spring, I posted about the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. I recently found out that The Bookseller has crowned the Diagram of Diagrams, bestowing the title of Oddest Book Title among all the winners of the past 30 years. You may be surprised to...
by Sue Horner | Jul 17, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Marketers are going after another supposedly influential group these days: Generation Jones, a term coined by Los Angeles “culture expert” Jonathan Pontell. This is the group within Baby Boomers born between 1954 and 1965. It probably tells you something...
by Sue Horner | May 30, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I ran across a couple of words this week (on Word Spy and Buzz Whack) that particularly appealed to me: Staycation. When you spend your vacation at home. (Thanks to high gas prices and a sluggish economy, it’s all many of us can afford.) Also known to those of...
by Sue Horner | Mar 18, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
While proofreading a client’s newsletter, I flagged this: A person quoted in an article about the switch of IT support to a call centre in India calls the staff “a well-trained, highly incented and duly rewarded group of employees.” UGH! I understand...
by Sue Horner | Feb 26, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Poets and musicians have a way with words. The snow falling as I write this brings to mind: my favourite Robert Frost poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening (“He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow”) and Canadian folk singer Gordon...
by Sue Horner | Jan 16, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
One of my clients used to challenge those of us (employees and freelancers) who wrote for the employee newsletter to come up with ever more interesting and clever headlines. During a weekly conference call discussing the newsletter, the editor often mentioned...
