Give your company a voice
The offices of Words etc will be closed for a much-needed holiday from 31 July to 14 August 2017. We will return refreshed and brimming with enthusiasm on Monday 14 August when the office will reopen and we will respond to any requests.
Standing out from the crowd is vital to business success. Yet very few businesses are in the enviable position of providing such a unique product or service that they have no competitors. Most of us must compete with others in our field who provide a very similar offering, differentiated only by price, features, location or quality of service, if that. So what makes your product or service stand out?
As a marketer, it’s easy to make lots of noise and generate press coverage for a genuinely unique product or service that is bursting with innovative features and unparalleled customer benefits.
…but how did the word come about?
The word ‘Brexit’ has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary within five years of being coined, a timescale the dictionary describes as “highly unusual”. The speed with which it became widely used and recognised was impressive, fuelled by the fact it filled a huge empty space in our language, and the growing importance of the phenomenon it described. But who created it?
According to BBC News,
Poor crisis communication makes airline laughing stock
United Airlines’ shares fell more than 4% in April as outrage over Dr David Dao of Kentucky being dragged off an overbooked flight finally caught up to the stock. The incident, exacerbated by poor communication, meant United’s shares were among the worst performers in the S&P 500. According to Andy Swan of LikeFolio, which monitors social media for financial applications, United’s chief executive Oscar Muñoz poured fuel on the flames with his insensitive and,
The semicolon is perhaps the most underused of punctuation marks and this may be due largely to confusion over its purpose and correct use. The simplest way of describing what a semicolon does is to signify a long pause. How long? The best answer I can give is somewhere between a comma and a full stop.
There are no precise guidelines and that is possibly one of the reasons behind them falling into disuse.
Google has created a fascinating graphic of America’s top misspellings by analysing what people in each state type into its search engine. In Louisiana and Oregon, for instance, most people are unable to spell ‘definitely’, while in California they struggle with ‘desert’. In New York and Colorado people have difficulties spelling ‘beautiful’, in Florida ‘tomorrow’ proves problematic and in Washington, North Carolina and Missouri ‘pneumonia’ is most commonly misspelt. Pity the poor population of Massachusetts though – their most troublesome spelling is the name of their own state!
Regular readers of my blog will know that I care about grammar mistakes, particularly all-too-common apostrophe abuse. So I applaud this grammar vigilante who tours his hometown of Bristol in the dead of night, armed only with a ladder and stickers, correcting the most offensive errors.
https://www.facebook.com/bbcbreakfast/videos/1661567050524093/
It has long been quarrelled over by writers but the ‘Oxford comma’ now has a new champion in the unlikely form of Christopher O’Connor, a lorry driver from Maine, and 50 fellow truckers. The drivers emerged victorious in a court case with their employer over overtime pay. Unusually, it hinged on the absence of the Oxford comma (also known as a ‘serial comma’) in state legislation covering overtime pay.
Quick grammar aside: The Oxford comma is used before the words ‘and’ or ‘or’ in a list of three or more things to clarify sentences in which things are listed.
Doh! Prime Minister given porn star’s name
The White House has been left red-faced after it was discovered that officials misspelt Prime Minister Theresa May’s name no fewer than three times – spelling it the same way as that of a popular porn star (so we’re told).
Apparently, Teresa May (spelt without an ‘h’) is a soft porn actress popular in the US who appeared in the video for the Prodigy’s Smack My B**** Up and films such as ‘Mystique’,
New words for a new year
If one of your New Year resolutions is to expand your vocabulary, 2016 saw many new and useful additions to the English dictionary. Early in the year, Judy Murray revealed her son Andy and his wife Kim call her ‘Glam-ma’ – a word used to describe a new breed of grandmother who is successful, glamorous and young-looking. Around Halloween, ‘Trumpkin’ was coined to describe a pumpkin made to look like Donald Trump,
