I’m sure you have one of those relatives who forwards scary emails to you. Sometimes it’s about how you should always check the back seat of your car when you get in, in case a rapist or murderer is hiding there. Sometimes it’s about how some Internet virus is going to wipe your hard drive and steal your identity and all your hubcaps. It’s frustrating because the warnings are nearly always bogus, and the person who sent the email would have known that if he or she had just bothered to go to Snopes.com before hitting “send.” Which you know because you checked it out at Snopes.com yourself, didn’t you? Continue reading “Do Your Due Diligence”
Tag: The New York Times
Well Defined? Nevermind.
Writers. We write. And our tools are words. So, while contemplating this week’s blog post, I had the brilliant idea of writing about words and their definitions, using… words and their definitions. It’s almost perfect. If by “perfect” I mean “utterly confusing and almost entirely pointless.” So, anyway, a couple years ago, The New York Times compiled a list of the 50 words most likely to stump their own readers. Amazingly, “defenestrate” was not among them (if it had been, I would have defined it as “To demonstrate a specialty fencing technique often used to remove the fins of albacore tuna”). Unhelpfully, perhaps, they neglected to include definitions. Which is where I come in. Don’t get me wrong—this being the internet which, like nature, abhors a vacuum—somebody already came along and performed this admirable service, but I’m going to go one better. I will proceed to pick 13 of the 50 words, more or less at random, and provide not one but two definitions, one of which is the correct one and one which I made up out of whole cloth for no other reason than to be extremely annoying. And if you’re just as bored as me (woah, Cobain flash), you can follow along and expose me for the consummate liar I am. And since I’m also most likely stealing this whole idea from a board game or something, I’m a liar and a thief (lookit, another Cobain flash). Continue reading “Well Defined? Nevermind.”