Grammar

Language portal bab.la is holding its annual competition of top language lovers, and Sentence first is honoured to appear in the Language Professionals category. Click the image below to see the 100 shortlisted (if that’s not an oxymoron) and vote for Sentence first or another blog of your choice: My Twitter page (@StanCarey) was also selected, so if you’re feeling generous you can vote for me here: Though I placed respectably last year (see the badges in the sidebar), my expectations in these contests are modest; tireless self-promotion is not my strong point. But they’re a good way to find new language writers, and they’re also an opportunity to welcome new visitors. Finally, if you’re in a voting or browsing kind of mood, there are also polls for Facebook pages and language-learning blogs. Filed under: blogging, language, writing Tagged: bab.la, blogging, blogs, competition, language, language news, Lexiophiles, polls, Twitter, writing

A team of researchers at MIT has devised a series of games to crowdsource the meaning of verbs. They’re gathering data on how particular verbs are used (e.g., does to strike always denote physical contact). There are currently four different games available with more promised. Crowdsourcing the analysis of data is one of the hot trends in science. Galaxy Zoo may be the most successful and famous of these efforts. Dictionaries have been crowdsourcing the collection of citations for well over a century, but now linguistic researchers are bringing the power of massed human minds to definition writing. You do have to register to participate in VerbCorner, but the the info you give is pretty minimal. (Some basic demographic info, like age and country of origin, and an email address for password recovery.) (Tip o’ the Hat to the Lousy Linguist) [Discuss this post]

There’s nothing wrong with this caption on Yahoo! Shine that moving the apostrophe to the left wouldn’t fix: The apostrophe should be used to show the omission of digits (in this case, 19), and not to form the plural of a decade: ’60s is correct. Filed under: Apostrophes, Plurals, Punctuation Tagged: apostrophe, editing, incorrect punctuation, plurals, proofreading, punctuation mistakes, Shine, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shine

I'm afraid to say that this is more of me not getting around to blogging. So many things on the list, but my day job has been taking over my nights. But several people have asked to hear the interview with me and Ben Yagoda from Radio 4's Today Programme (AmE program, of course), aired earlier today. Though I'd thought you could to listen to radio (but not TV) from abroad on BBC iPlayer, apparently you cannot (or cannot anymore). It's here as a video, as social media makes it easier to post videos than to post mp3s, and is a .mov file. I hope your computer's media player can play it. The title's rather biased representation of who's on is courtesy of Better Half, who originally posted this on his Facebook feed. Since we're in different time zones at the moment, I haven't got the power to wake him up and make him change it. By the way, after these years of protecting BH's privacy by giving him a pseudonym, I find I don't want to any more. Instead I want to introduce you to him. His first novel is released in the UK in September and in the US in October, and you can click through those places to read (a little) more about it. Yay, Phil!

Edna O’Brien’s book Girl With Green Eyes has a romantic line involving bicycles: Ah, the bloom of you, I love your North-Circular-Road-Bicycle-Riding-Cheeks. It’s a sweet declaration ending in an impressive hyphenated string, though if I were editing it I would separate cheeks from the compound and reduce the capitalisation: North-Circular-Road-bicycle-riding cheeks. In a modest correspondence between books decades apart, Declan Hughes’s detective novel The Dying Breed has another elaborate compound phrase constructed with the help of bicycle imagery: I made a face at that, my d’you-think-I-cycled-up-the-Liffey-on-a-bicycle face. When I tweeted that sentence I was treated to a few variations on the theme: Belfast’s D’you think I floated down the Lagan in a bubble? (@charlieconnelly), and Glasgow’s D’ye think ah came up the Clyde on a water biscuit/banana boat? (@ozalba; @Yanbustone). There are many versions of this idiom, often beginning Do you think…, You must think…, or I didn’t… More (or less) familiar lines include: Do you think I came down in the last shower?, You must think I was born yesterday, and I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I love the water biscuit one, but for some reason I relate most strongly to cycling on the Liffey – so long as I steer clear of Gogarty’s swans. Filed under: books, Ireland, language, phrases Tagged: bicycles, books, Declan Hughes, editing, Edna O'Brien, fiction, hyphens, idioms, Irish books, language, Liffey, literature, phrases, punctuation

This week MedCity News shared an article about patient engagement that posits, "Patients today aren’t truly engaged with health technology or even with their own health." The article, written by Laura Wagner and originally appearing in VentureBeat, is a commentary based on a session from HealthBeat 2013, a VentureBeat presented conference. VentureBeat "covers disruptive technology and explains why it matters in our lives," which well explains the session's title: “Consumer Health Apps: Human Centered Design." However, if the panel's conclusion was that patients are not engaged with health IT or their own health, then the human centered design part of consumer health apps is clearly failing—because the apps are not designed to meet consumer needs. No one needs an app. In order to even want an app, a patient—engaged or otherwise—must first have a device. Far too many advocates on the health IT bandwagon assert that smartphones are ubiquitous. According to Pew Internet statistics, 85 percent of U.S. adults have a cell phone. Of that 85 percent, 53 percent have a smartphone. Of the 53 percent who have a smartphone, 52 percent have used that smartphone to collect health information, Pew Internet reports. The additional questions to ask are—of that half of a half, how many are using an app and how many remain patients of Dr. Google? One report from Adeven, a mobile analytics firm, provides some insight—nearly 400,000 apps sit in the iOS App Store classified as "zombies," generating few downloads and little to no revenue for their producers. The beauty of the internet's search function is the power of suggestion. One doesn't need to know exactly what one is looking for in order to embark on a search. With each return of results comes an addition of knowledge that enables one to further refine one's search and/or run off down an entirely different rabbit hole of information. Apps limit this kind of unfettered exploration. Their specificity of operation—the very thing that makes them a marketable app—is exactly what keeps them from being the go-to tool for inquiring minds. To want to use an app is to want to do a specific thing. To engage patients in this form of health IT we must not ask how we get patients to use an app, but how we get patients to want to do the certain thing in question. Whether we want patients to keep track of their blood pressure, count calories, log blood glucose readings, or learn about cellular reproduction, we must first find their source of motivation. Games and rewards only go so far in triggering prolonged motivation—but show me the game that rewards me not with new flowers for my virtual garden or a special frog to breed and instead with reduced insurance premiums and I'll make it part of my daily routine. What patients want is to define their own goals and outcomes. To be "healthy" is couched in institutional ideology of standards and measurements; yet a patient who couldn't care less about his BMI and blood pressure may care enormously about living long enough to walk his daughter down the aisle or celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary. To engage a patient in his own health one must find what matters to that individual patient. To engage a patient in health IT is thus a secondary matter, and engaging patients in mobile health IT a tertiary one. The benefit of utilizing health IT to achieve the patient's self-defined goals and outcomes must be clearly defined with a detailed measure of cause and effect. Should the aforementioned patient who wishes to walk his daughter down the aisle receive a doctor's recommendation to lose 10 percent of his body weight, the benefits of doing so must be illustrated in relation to his goal. According to a recent New York Times article, a recent national study found that "patients who lost a mere 7 percent of their total body weight reduced their risk for diabetes by 58 percent." For the patient to gain his own definition of meaningful use

Instead of focusing on the names the writer for Yahoo! Movies got wrong (like Taissa Farmiga and Sofia Coppola) or the arbitrary word that got capitalized, let’s focus on the words that are correct: That was easy. Filed under: Capitalizing, Misspellings Tagged: bad spelling, capitalization, editing, incorrect spelling, misspelled celebrities, misspelling, proofreading, Sofia Coppola, Taissa Farmiga, Yahoo! Movies

I’m pleased to announce that, for the fifth consecutive year, this blog has been honored with a nomination in the Lexiophiles Top Language Blogs competition, “Language Professional” division.   Support a professional! Click the badge to cast your vote for Fritinancy!   Make that two nominations. I’ve also been nominated for Top Language Twitter Account: Click the badge to vote for my Twitter account! What’s in it for you? Just the deep (and cheap) satisfaction of supporting a blog and Twitter account dedicated to the profound, puzzling, quirky, mysterious, enlightening world of names, brands, and the language of commerce. Remember: I receive zero compensation for publishing all this content (or “kohn-tent,” as a Russian friend used to say). So your votes are, to me, the equivalent of winning the Powerball or being fully funded on Kickstarter or getting acqui-hired by Yahoo. Or like discovering a treasure chest full of Bitcoin. Vote once (in each category) and vote at once: the contest ends at midnight June 9, German time. Like Bartles & Jaymes in the famous ads from the 1980s, I thank you for your support.   P.S. Congratulations to fellow nominees and blog/Twitter friends Grammar Girl, Literal-Minded, Lingua Greca, Word Routes, Johnson, Back of the Cereal Box, and Sentence First.

SUBJECT-VERB PROBLEMS Find, identify and correct the error in the following piece. “Officials said as much as 125,000 pounds of plastic was on scene, keeping the inferno fuelled despite the best effort of dozens of firefighters.” Chris Thompson and Trevor Wilhelm, “One firefighter injured as black smoke covers city”, The Windsor Star, Wednesday, May, 22, 2013. SO TRUE! Identify the author of the following observation. “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” TODAY’S WORD The word for today is “aberrant”. What part of speech is “aberrant”? What other parts of speech can be made from “aberrant”? Which syllable should be stressed in “aberrant“? Define “aberrant” and use it in a sentence that demonstrates its meaning.

Via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org, an interesting project, VerbCorner:Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. At VerbCorner, we are trying to work out what verbs mean. Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of verb meaning. Ultimately, we hope to probe dozens of aspects of the meaning of thousands of verbs. This is a massive project, which is why we need your help! We will be sharing the results of this project freely with scientists and the public alike, and we expect it to make a valuable contribution to linguistics, psychology, and computer science.Give it a try!