What an editor does

Spotted in a Facebook editors’ group, with no attribution, unfortunately. Thanks to the person who put this together. My daily work life is definitely the bottom right image!

 

Aptronyms

An aptronym is where a name matches some characteristic of a person, typically their occupation. The first I ever experienced was when I was a kid—the town’s only butcher was… Mr Butcher!

More recently, I’ve come across other names that match their occupations or areas of expertise. For example, authors Whiting and Salmon have both written on fish, Swann has written on birds, and today I came across Fangue, who has co-authored an article on a species of sea krait!

See also: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/names-suiting-occupation/

Children suck

Or at least, that’s what this sign says. Spotted in my local medical surgery near the children’s play area.

I think they meant to tell parents to put any toys into the bin that their children have put into their mouths or that they have dirtied.

It might have been better to avoid ‘dirty’ and ‘suck’ (especially the unfortunately worded ‘children suck’) and instead used wording similar to this: ‘For used play area toys. Please put play area toys used by your children into this bin.’

When spellcheck just doesn’t work…

Another oopsie! that shows that spellcheckers need to be used with caution and supplemented by real eyes attached to a real brain. Otherwise, legitimate, but erroneous, words get through.

A 2013 album by Robben Ford (Bringing it back home) has these tracks (note the title for #4):

1. Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky (4:55)
2. Birds Nest Bound (5:51)
3. Fair Child (4:24)
4. Oh, Virginia (4:18)
5. Slick Capers Blues (3:50)
6. On That Morning (7:14)
7. Traveler’s Waltz (3:34)
8. Most Likely You Can Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine (4:57)
9. Trick Bag (4:06)
10. Fool’s Paradise (5:37)

However, Barnes and Noble’s website has the tracks listed as:

[Thanks to my DH who spotted this one]

 

Can Siri deal with Australian accents?

Based on the recent experiences of one of my loyal readers, Siri has trouble interpreting simple commands spoken in his ‘educated Australian’ accent.

He had a new iPhone and wanted to know how to close an app as it wasn’t the same as on his previous iPhone, so he asked Siri.

Here’s how Siri responded to that request (note that his spoken words were correctly converted to text, but even then Siri went off on the wrong tangent — how Norwegian Krona got into the mix is beyond me… and him!):

So the next day he asked Siri to show him the manual so he could find out for himself, and got this ‘helpful’ information (I’m not sure why there’s a blue dotted underline beneath the word ‘the’, one of the most common words in English):

Perhaps Siri thinks it’s all powerful and has totally superseded the manual to the point where it doesn’t believe there *is* a manual ;-) Sort of like ‘ethnic cleansing’ for potential usurpers to the throne of (mis)information.

It looks like voice recognition still has a way to go…

Names suiting occupation

Sometimes a person’s name was just made for the occupation they have. When I was a kid, the only butcher in my small town was… Mr Butcher! Seriously. And for many years the spokesperson for the Bureau of Meteorology in our state was a Mr Southern.

In last week’s local paper, a veterinary clinic was advertising for a vet nurse, and the names of the top of the ad included a Dr Cockerill and a Dr Bunny ;-)

(I couldn’t figure out the odd-looking logo until I looked closely — it’s a paw print [in white] over a red cross, in case you were wondering.)

Serendipitous placement

Sometimes I see adjacent posts on Facebook or Twitter that came from random people in my friends lists, but that have a common thread or even color in their images, or that are juxtaposed in such a way that reading them in a stream is funny. And so with these two from my Twitter stream the other day:

Well, it made me laugh!

Problem-solving chart

Warning: Coarse language

**************

Seen on Facebook and copied from there. I’d love to acknowledge the creator, but I don’t have that information.

Spitting Coke

A bit of background to the screen shot below…

Regular readers of this blog know that I write the occasional ‘Writing Tips’ for my work colleagues, some of which I reproduce here after removing anything specific related to individuals or the company. I always get some nice emails back saying how much my colleagues appreciate these tips of mine — and how much they look forward to them.

One of the teams I work for has been working various sections of a single (very large!) document for more than a year (it’s still not ready). I only get to edit it every so often, so I’m not looking at it every day. But when I do edit it there are parts that make my eyes glaze over, so I don’t know how the authors can maintain momentum on it.

So, with that background, here’s an instant message exchange I had with one of the authors:

Well, it made me laugh ;-)

Headline and image juxtaposition

Seen in our local Sunday paper:

The ‘Labs’ article was about meth labs, but at first glance it looked like it was about dogs as the picture next to it was of a labrador cross. Either the editor did this deliberately for a laugh, or it was an unfortunate error.

It’s the sort of thing Jay Leno used to feature in ‘Headlines’ on his show ;-)