JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 20, 2011, 3:12 pm
So I haven't written anything here on The Engine Room since last summer. That's because I've been working on a new site, Cathedral City Guide. Why? Well, I was keen to build something in WordPress; my day job had moved almost totally away from subbing; and I wanted a new challenge. Most of all...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Jun 2, 2010, 4:00 pm
Unlikely as it sounds, I recently got involved in a drunken discussion on the difference between a tree, a bush and a plant. I Googled 'tree' on my smartphone and one of the first definitions I came across was: Something constructed in the form of, or considered as resembling, a tree, consisti...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 31, 2010, 4:28 pm
The Engine Room didn't make it into bab.la and Lexiophiles' list of the 'Top 100 Language Blogs 2010', but if you voted for us then thank you. Although the list is dominated by teaching and translation blogs (which usually hold no great interest for me), a few of my favourite blogs are present - inc...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 27, 2010, 12:18 pm
This query has been emailed into The Engine Room: Is there a word which means that a person's visual identity is unknown? For example, the West End Whingers are often referred to as "anonymous" as people don't know what they look like. However, they are not anonymous as they really are called Phi...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 24, 2010, 2:00 pm
Nothing very exciting today - just a bit of image and caption duplication I spotted on BBC News a while back: I like capturing mistakes like these, not so I can feel smug, but because they are often corrected so quickly (especially on the BBC website). Somehow their ephemeral nature mak...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 22, 2010, 5:02 am
During my time working on B2B transport mags and now websites, I've come across some interesting transport-related words. 'Crashworthiness' is one of my favourites. According to Wikipedia: Crashworthiness is the ability of a structure to protect its occupants during an impact. This is commonly test...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 19, 2010, 11:59 am
According to BBC News (or more accurately, Pretoria News crime reporter Graeme Hosken), 50 odd people are killed every day in South Africa. Sometimes it pays to be normal.
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 17, 2010, 2:44 pm
Through Fuelmyblog I've had the chance to sample some absinthe from Absinthe-Shop. What's that got to do with language use and journalism? Well, I could mention the (tired) stereotype of hard-drinking journalists, or talk about the connection between absinthe and writers such as Arthur Rimbaud and G...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 15, 2010, 7:45 am
Celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson is a man of few words. One word, in fact - and that word is 'gravadlax'. I spotted this on the BBC homepage a few days ago.
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 13, 2010, 12:00 pm
Last year The Engine Room took part in bab.la and Lexiophiles' 'Top 100 Language Blogs' competition, coming eighth in the 'Language Professionals' category and 45th overall. The 2010 competition is now under way and the blog is competing in the same category as before. User votes count for 50% of th...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 11, 2010, 12:05 pm
BBC News has been running a story titled 'What is Gordon Brown's legacy?': Nothing, apparently.
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 9, 2010, 12:36 pm
Recently I bought a jar of Percol decaffeinated instant coffee (pictured below). On the back of the jar there's some blurb about Columbia Colombia, where the coffee is grown. I'm somewhat bemused by this sentence: This landscape is sparse but beautiful in it's own way, like a good decaf. Never mind ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 7, 2010, 3:53 am
This is what Labour MP Margaret Hodge had to say after BNP leader Nick Griffin came third in her constituency: "This is really a great moment in our history, a never-to-be forgotten moment for both the good and decent people of Barking and Dagenham." So there are only two good and decent people in B...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 5, 2010, 4:00 am
For the past few months I've had an idea brewing for a new site/blog (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the two), and I'm just starting to turn it into reality using WordPress. This is my first experience with WordPress, so even if my idea turns out to be a stinker at least I'll hav...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - May 3, 2010, 3:33 pm
This picture of Conservative leader David Cameron went viral last week, but with election day on Thursday I think it's worth sharing: Thanks to Gareth for sending me the photo, and Michael Schofield for taking it in the first place.
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 30, 2010, 7:34 am
Yesterday a booklet came through the post titled "Election addresses by candidates for Mayor of Lewisham". The election address by Conservative candidate Simon Nundy says: "Only the Conservatives can stop Labour on May 6th." (From context it is clear that he is referring to the mayoral electio...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 27, 2010, 12:19 pm
So yesterday's Metro carried this advert for 'social music store' mflow. Have a look at the terms and conditions (and click on the image if you want to see a larger version): Whoops! Terms and conditions are usually there because they have to be, so missing them off is worse than you might think.
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 21, 2010, 4:16 pm
A recent BBC News article mentions "the discovery of a vast 'microbial mat', covering an area equivalent to the size of Greece". It's unusual to see Greece used as a unit of comparison or measurement. I find it harder to gauge the area of Greece than, say, France, because of Greece's irregular shap...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 19, 2010, 5:10 pm
The Engine Room has been included on a list of the '50 Best Blogs for Grammar Geeks' on Universityreviewsonline.com. For some reason the list falls into the website's archive for October 2005 - perhaps it is an old list that has just been updated? Other entries on the same page of the ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 18, 2010, 8:50 am
Clutchslip spotted this sign to a "temporary waiting area": What, as opposed to a permanent waiting area?
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 17, 2010, 6:03 pm
So last week as part of my job I spent three days at a trade show - something of a novelty for me because I am usually office-based. Another novelty was using Twitpic to share a few photos of the show on Twitter. Here's one of Bibendum - Michelin Man as he's more often known. I also tried out TwitPi...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 8, 2010, 2:00 pm
Something strange is happening to the way I use email. Last week I sent someone a long, information-packed email that they had been expecting. I immediately followed this up with a direct message on Twitter letting them know that I had just sent the email. Later on that evening I receive...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 6, 2010, 2:17 pm
At the weekend I met some friends in a slightly upmarket pub and was startled to see bottles of "body lotion" in the unisex toilet cubicles: Handwash I could understand. You need to wash your hands; you use the handwash. But body lotion? Who would want to apply lotion to their bodies in a pub toile...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 5, 2010, 6:09 am
Visual metaphor of the week goes to the fizzing, spurting candles on TV cooking programme The Delicious Miss Dahl: (The candles appear at about 15 minutes, 10 seconds in on episode two, 'Romance', which is available to watch on the BBC's iPlayer for the next month.)
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 4, 2010, 8:08 am
I thought this was a strange BBC News headline: First, there are two orders of magnitude between "thousands" (headline) and "hundreds of thousands" (body copy). A quick play with Firebug suggests that "Hundreds of thousands 'to miss out on university degree'" would fit - just - as a headline, altho...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 3, 2010, 7:59 am
I spotted this on the Conservative Party website recently: The phrase "jobless recovery" was new to me. At first I thought it was just a synonym for "return to high unemployment", but it turns out that a jobless recovery is something more specific. Wikipedia defines it as: Recovery from a recession...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Apr 1, 2010, 5:34 pm
"Donate second hand clothes for men and women and food items"? I didn't realise that food items needed second hand clothes...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 31, 2010, 5:06 pm
Apologies for the lack of posts recently - I've been really busy at work. On the plus side I now own an iPhone, which makes it much easier for me to take and upload photos. Here's the first: This bottle of wine (sorry: whine) has been sitting on my kitchen worktop for the past month, waiti...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 27, 2010, 7:10 pm
Yesterday morning our head of content pointed out to me a Times Online story titled Vienna Boys’ Choir Caught up in Sex Abuse Scandals - written by Roger Boyes: Not exactly a case of nominative determinism (Roger Boyes doesn't himself roger boys, as far as I know), but pretty good nonetheless...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 23, 2010, 4:02 pm
Gareth has sent in this scan of a letter that was recently published in the Daily Mail: Gareth writes: Even disregarding the letter's content, the name at the bottom clearly shows this up as a spoof letter – although I fear this may be lost on many of the newspaper's readers. The quest...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 21, 2010, 5:13 pm
Carl Jackson has written in to say: I just thought your readers might appreciate this passage on grammar and usage from an SAT parody book called The BSAT: http://www.bsatworld.com/lookInside/grammarUsage Thanks, Carl. I especially liked this par: Compare "I drank too much" to "I have drunk too m...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 17, 2010, 3:43 pm
I began this blog back in April 2007 with Apus, who was then chief sub to my sub editor. In February 2008 Apus retired, although he continued to contribute to the blog until the summer of 2009. So what has Apus been doing since then? Apart from sitting on the beach and eating bacon sandwiches, he h...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 16, 2010, 3:23 pm
What, as opposed to metaphorical use? I also love how the text is left-aligned (ragged right, if you prefer to call it that) rather than centred. It gives the sign a certain poetical quality.
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 14, 2010, 7:30 am
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 13, 2010, 4:50 am
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 11, 2010, 12:00 pm
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 10, 2010, 12:00 pm
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 9, 2010, 12:00 pm
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 7, 2010, 7:42 am
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 6, 2010, 11:06 am
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 4, 2010, 8:16 am
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Mar 1, 2010, 3:45 pm
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Feb 28, 2010, 3:02 pm
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Feb 25, 2010, 4:50 pm
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Feb 23, 2010, 11:27 am
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Feb 20, 2010, 7:19 am
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Feb 16, 2010, 1:27 pm
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Feb 15, 2010, 2:17 pm
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