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Watch your Ps and Qs
Etiquette is a set of rules for general politeness. As was put down in 1998: “Blowing one’s nose..is..set within a taken-for-granted set of social procedures and etiquette.” As you can probably tell from the spelling, “etiquette” entered English from French, and not that long ago as words go — probably in the early 1700s. But the Continue reading
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Sandy Douglas and OXO
Enjoy computer games? They’ve been around longer than you think. In fact, they’ve almost certainly been around longer than you! The first graphic computer game was OXO (a version of tic-tac-toe, or noughts and crosses), and Alexander Douglas created it in 1952. Alexander “Sandy” Douglas was born May 21, 1921 in London. He evidently had Continue reading
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The Hooded Claw
You can live in a neighborhood. Part of life is childhood. You can utter a falsehood. You can wear a hood. You can open the hood of your car (or, if you’re driving a convertible in England, you can put the hood up or down). If your childhood goes badly in a bad neighborhood and Continue reading
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Emile Berliner
Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the phonograph in the late 1870s, and Alexander Graham Bell made it an actually useful device, but it still had some issues. Both Edison and Bell used cylinders for the recording medium. These worked fine, but were difficult to manufacture in large quantities, and as you can see from Continue reading
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Egg-zactly
Word of the day: egging Something that happens on Halloween is “egging” — pelting a car or house with eggs in order to create a mess and play a prank. It can also happen in a theater, or at least it used to; when a performer was particularly bad, the audience might throw eggs. Rotten Continue reading
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The viscosity of cruelty
One of the problems with similar, easily-confused words is that the more we rely on spell checkers, the more susceptible we are to mixing them up without noticing. Spell checkers at least notify you when you make a spelling mistake, and probably just fix it for you. But when you use a word — which Continue reading
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Jingoism? Bunkum.
The January, 1881 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine thought it would be helpful to explain that “We call it Jingoism in England; in France it is called Chauvinism; and in the United States, Bunkum.” Interesting, at least, that both “jingoism” and “chauvinism” are still in use, but the US alternative — or at least what Gentleman’s Magazine thought Continue reading
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Ronald Wayne
You’ve heard of the “two Steves” who founded Apple Computer, but there was a third founder as well: Ronald Wayne. Today is his 90th birthday. Wayne met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak when all three were working at Atari. Wayne was older, and at Atari created the company’s manufacturing and inventory control system. He was Continue reading
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Lipograms
More about lipograms at the end. In the meantime, here’s a great one by Steve Chrisomalis: “Looking at this paragraph with confusion? I’ll aid you slightly. Is any odd gap, lacuna or omission obvious to you? Got it now? No? That’s right – this is a lipogram – a book, paragraph or similar thing in Continue reading
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The Rolling Tundra Review
If you look at a map of northeastern Russia, extending westward to Norway, you’ll see a giant peninsula. It arches over Finland and connects to Sweden and Norway, enclosing the Baltic Sea. Tracking eastward across the northern coast of the peninsula, there are various areas where different groups of indigenous people lived — and still Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.
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