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Category Archive for 'Language'

Oh yeah, that clears things up

Posted in Academia, Language on Sep 11th, 2009

I haven’t chimed in on the gender and biblioblogging stuff because I don’t think it’s a very interesting issue.  As far as I can tell, the women in the field probably feel like they have better things to do.  No one is preventing anyone from starting a wordpress.com blog, are they?  If we were talking [...]

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Why Apple needs to get out of the content business

Posted in Culture, Language, Technology on Aug 5th, 2009

It is imperative that Apple stay in the platform business and stay out of the content business.  When they opened the iTunes store a few years ago, they became a music retailer like Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart.  Like the first two of those (and unlike the third), they did not attempt to moderate or [...]

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Finally some common sense: using “they” as a singular pronoun

Posted in Language on Jul 29th, 2009

I love using “they” as a pronoun for an unspecified person, but I usually end up re-writing the sentence to make it unnecessary. It simply hasn’t caught on enough to make the change comfortable. Maybe the New York Times can help.  Evidently, “they” as a singular pronoun has a long and storied history, [...]

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Cussin’ helps us endure pain

Posted in Language on Jul 13th, 2009

Well, duh.  Researchers have shown that college students can endure longer periods with their hands submerged in icy water if they shout an obscenity of their choice rather than a non-obscene neutral word.
I once saw a good friend take a “trail bath” in a stream in the Thunder Swamp area of eastern Pennsylvania.  This was [...]

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