19
November
2007
OK, this has very little to do with transcription, but it’s great! Another one of those charity websites, but instead of ‘click on this boring old advertise link once a day and we’ll donate something’ you can donate by clicking the correct definition of a bunch of weird (and some not so weird) words. It’s not perfect - there’s the odd misspelt word in there, which for a vocabulary site isn’t ideal, and because the definitions are one or two words long on the whole, they’re obviously only one possible meaning of the word. Also of course you could donate more by working for half an hour and donating your earnings than by playing on this site, freerice.com and donating grains of rice. But it’s fun, it’s educational and a bunch of us had a fun competition going for a while to see who could reach the most difficult vocab level (which if you want to play, is level 50) first. Each time you get a few definitions right you go up a vocab level, and when you get one wrong you come down one.
Congratulations to my mum, Ruth Piatkus, for winning our little competition … a large bar of Galaxy awaits you.
No prizes on the site, but you do get the satisfaction of knowing that for every right word you donate 10 grains of rice to charity! ;o)
Posted: Grammar
16
August
2007
I’m feeling lonely today. I seem to be the only person in the world that cares about the fact that till does not mean until. When I transcribe and someone says something like, ‘I worked ‘til I dropped’ then that’s how I transcribe it: ‘til, not till. Or, if I’m doing edited transcription, I would certainly change it to until.
Till means lots of things. As a geology student I came across it as unstratified glacial deposits. I discovered today that it also means a public treasury. Of course it is also what was known in my younger days as a ‘cash register’. I was already familiar with another meaning: to work the land in order to make it ready for cultivation. But what it does NOT mean is ‘up to the time of’ a.k.a. until! I feel a bit better having done a Google definition search (you just type define:word into Google and it gives you a bunch of definitions for the word. I typed in define:until and it only came up with two definitions. One was the meaning of the word in computer science. The other was not really a definition at all. It said: “in formal writing, until is preferred. Do not write ’til.” I am not alone after all!
Posted: Grammar
10
August
2007
If you love the English language, with all its foibles, weird and wonderful words and even more weird and wonderful word derivations then you’ll love this site: Worldwidewords.org, which has everything you could possibly want to know about an awful lot of weird words, topical words, turns of phrase and so on, and even has a newsletter you an subscribe to. It’s put together by Michael Quinion who, via a circuitous career route almost as tortuous as mine, has ended up as an author who writes about words, and does so very well indeed.
Posted: Grammar