Big games don’t phase him and other misused pears
Want some more fun reading other people’s mistakes with homonyms? It’s impossible to run out of material for this series of pears pairs of words people misuse. .C.J. Stroud had an amazing rookie year as quarterback for the Houston Texans. His offensive coordinator said, “He’s proven that big games don’t faze him.” Unfortunately, in my local paper, the headline proclaimed, “He’s proven that big games don’t phase him.” Another issue of the same paper included the headline, “A peak inside ‘safe injection site.’” Time was when newspapers had editors, part of whose job it was to fix errors like that. We don’t expect much from the Web. A Google search result page had an ad with the headline “Books by Doctor’s.” But social media is a gold mine of misused pears.
Continue reading →Ghoti for lunch? What other fast food can we order?
Everyone knows that George Bernard Shaw, a proponent of spelling reform, pointed out that “fish” can be spelled “ghoti.” Along with a lot of what everyone knows, it’s wrong. “Ghoti” does not appear in any of Shaw’s writings. So where does it come from? And why does it make some people mad? All the necessary research is making me hungry, so I’ll have to decide what to get when I go out for lunch—and how to spell it.
Continue reading →The subscription model in the book industry: then and now
Today, nearly everything is available on subscription. The subscription model entails selling a product or service for a recurring price. Depending on the company and product, the bill can be paid every month, every year, or some other interval. The book industry used a somewhat different subscription model beginning in the 17th century, where authors could raise the money to print their books before publication. It amounted to an early version of crowdsourcing. Selling e-books requires a different business model than selling printed books. The publisher has one master copy of the book, which it makes available to customers’ e-readers. When they sell to libraries, they have imposed a new subscription model that essentially rips off libraries and, in the case of public libraries, tax payers. Where did it come from and what are libraries doing about it?
Continue reading →Using colons: an explanation follows
Colons are among the oldest punctuation marks in use. At first, they indicated a pause somewhat longer than a comma and shorter than a period. Now, they more likely indicate that what follows is related in to what comes before by offering some kind of explanation. Or to put it another way, a colon means the sentence isn’t finished, and what follows is important. Colons also have important roles besides in sentences. The rules for using them are straightforward and not controversial.
Continue reading →William Frederick Poole: pioneering indexer and librarian
These days, municipalities all over the US have tax-supported public libraries. Public libraries, academic libraries, and others offer patrons indexes to help them find articles in periodicals. We have William Frederick Poole to thank for both. He first became famous for the first index to periodicals and later became a founding member of the American Library Association. For most of his career as a librarian, he advocated for public libraries.
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