I have seen the future, and it’s a Twait

I’m been very busy recently with barely time to pause for breath – so I’ve had to put the blog on the back-burner for a couple of weeks.

But I thought I’d share with you a Twitter application I’ve found really useful as Tweeter-in-Chief (er, the only one) for Milngavie Book and Arts Festival, which runs from 7-12 September.

The application is Twaitter, and it allows you to write and schedule future and recurring tweets. It’s currently free (in beta), although a Pro version is planned too for business users.

Twaitter’s been a life-saver for me as I’ve been able to tweet about Festival events and have them retweeted every few days. The beauty of the app is not just that it performs the task automatically for you. It’s that it takes some of the pressure off by giving you one less thing to remember. Which is a big advantage, in my book.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Twaitter screenshot - compose tweet

Screenshot 1 – Composing and scheduling a tweet

Twaitter screenshot - scheduled messages

Screenshot 2 – Sent and/or Scheduled tweets

And here are the developers’ suggestions on possible uses for Twaitter:

Ever had an idea for a tweet, but wanted to send it later or at a specific time?
Want to setup your #FollowFriday posts throughout the week so you dont forget to share great tweeple with your followers?
Have a fellow Twitterer whose birthday is coming up in a few days, but you’re afraid you might forget to send a “Happy Birthday” tweet when the day arrives?
Spend more time on Twitter than your work calendar? Ever want to send yourself a reminder or remind friends or followers of something?
Want to participate in a scheduled Twitter conversation even when you are too busy to attend?
Want to have links in your blog RSS feed automatically sent to Twitter?
Want to schedule a tweet to go out at 8:14AM (and not 8AM sharp)?

Some words to the wise

If you schedule recurring tweets about a specific event, make sure you set an end-date just before (or to coincide with) that of the event.

Space out your recurring tweets to avoid a spammy effect, and intersperse them with your usual cocktails of retweets, conversations, links and spur-of-the moment tweeets. Otherwise you’ll bore your followers to distraction.

If you’ve tried Twaitter, or a similar application, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

And in the meantime, check out the Milngavie Festival site and/or follow us on Twitter. The Festival’s now in its 3rd year and is run entirely by volunteers. With minimal (a grand total of £1500!) public funding and precious little sponsorship . We’ve got some wonderful events lined up so if you’re in the area do come along!

By Marian Dougan

Words

This lovely video, produced by Everynone for Radiolab, has been doing the rounds on Twitter, so you may already have seen it. It bears repeat viewing, I think. It’s about words and also about our common humanity. I find it moving.

Serendipity is a lovely word and a lovely concept. Shortly after watching the Words video, I came across Robert Kelly’s poem Towards the Day of Liberation:

It doesn’t matter what we see there
 

 

(the mouth is full of sense
no taste in listening
no sense to hear
what twists in the shallow water below the tongue)
 
(and if he says Listen! say
Drink the hearing
with
your own ears,
a word
is not to hear)
  
Language? To use language for the sake of communication is like using a forest of ancient trees to make paper towels and cardboard boxes from all those years the wind and crows danced in the up of its slow.
 
A word is not to hear
and not to say –
what is a word?
  
The Catechism begins:
Who made you?
Language 
made me.
Why did It make you?
It made me to confuse the branch with the wind.
Why that?
To hide the root.
Where is the root?
It lies beneath the tongue.
Speak it.
It lies beneath the speech.
Is it a word?
A word is the shadow of a body passing.
Whose body is that?
The shadow’s own.

“Towards the Day of Liberation” from Not This Island Music by Robert Kelly. Used by permission of  the author and of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © 1987 by Robert Kelly.

With thanks to NovaLanguages for pointing me to Robert Kelly’s poetry (of which I wasn’t able to maintain the original line spacing, for some reason).

By Marian Dougan

Commas: fascinating facts (and a Stop Press)

Comma butterfly

Fascinating comma fact 1

A comma is not just a punctuation mark, it’s also a type of butterfly, so-named because of the white comma-shaped marking on the underside of its wing (you can just about see it in the photo). UK Butterflies (which provides more detailed photos) describes the Comma as looking like a “tatty Small Tortoiseshell”. It may look pretty drab in the photo, but that’s deliberate:

When resting with wings closed this butterfly has excellent camouflage, the jagged outline of the wings giving the appearance of a withered leaf, making the butterfly inconspicuous when resting on a tree trunk or when hibernating.

Another “comma” butterfly is the Silver-spotted Skipper. It’s also known as the Hesperia comma, again for the markings on the underside of its wings.

Fascinating comma fact 2

The Italian word comma means “paragraph” (as in a sub-division of an article in a law). This reflects the origin of the word, as explained by the Online Etymology Dictionary:

a Latin word, nativized by 1590s, from L. comma “short phrase,” from Gk. komma “clause in a sentence,” lit. “piece which is cut off,” from koptein “to cut off,” from PIE base*(s)kep- “to cut, split” (see hatchet). Like colon (1) and period, a Greek rhetorical term for part of a sentence which has been transferred to the punctuation mark that identifies it.

The English “comma” is translated as virgola in Italian.

Not quite a comma fact, more a comma Stop Press

The Chicago Manual of Style has up-dated some of its rules, one of which concerns the comma:

Titles that end in question marks or exclamation points
The title of a work that ends in a question mark or exclamation point should now be followed by a comma if the grammar of the sentence would normally call for one or, in source citations or in an index, if a comma would normally follow the title.

More “Chicago now prefers” nuggets can be found at Significant Rule Changes in The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition.

More fascinating comma facts – and opinions – welcome. Share yours in the comments!

Photo of comma butterfly courtesy of Jaahur.

By Marian Dougan

The Oxford Comma dilemma: a solution?

To those of you still fretting over the Oxford Comma dilemma (and who don’t read the Comments – tsk, tsk!), the “august journal” Speculative Grammarian offers the following solution:

Since the OC appears to present more problems of CrossPondian translation than any other form of punctuation, a solution must be found which satisfies users on both sides of the Atlantic. Luckily one is at hand, and in the spirit of international understanding and cooperation, I now offer it to the world at large. Put the darn thing in if you must, but just below the printing line, so that it appears to be there but not there, if you see what I mean. It thus represents either an OC, or an apostrophe belonging to the line below – possibly incorrectly used but nobody’s going to notice that – or a spider high on printing ink. It becomes all things to all men. It is flexible, adaptable, and universally expressive: in other words, it is the perfect form of punctuation.

You can read the whole august article here. And if you’re still not convinced, take our poll and have your say.

By Marian Dougan

Oxford commas (2): Live dangerously – take our poll!

Do you use the Oxford (serial) comma?

Here’s a sentence with the Oxford comma:

My favourite foods are Greek yoghurt, salted almonds, cheese, and dark chocolate.

Here’s the same sentence without:

My favourite foods are Greek yoghurt, salted almonds, cheese and dark chocolate.

And here’s one where, unless you change the order of the list items, the serial comma is needed for clarity:

My favourite foods are Greek yoghurt, salted almonds, cheese, dark chocolate, and gin and tonic.

What’s your position on the Oxford comma?

By Marian Dougan

Oxford commas (1)

I was puzzled last week to see references on Twitter to the exotic-sounding “Oxford comma”, a new term to me. It turns out (thank you, Mark Allen and  Oxford Dictionaries) that the Oxford comma is another name for the “serial comma”:

an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list:

We sell books, videos, and magazines.
It’s known as the Oxford comma because it was traditionally used by printers, readers, and editors at Oxford University Press.  Not all writers and publishers use it, but it can clarify the meaning of a sentence when the items in a list are not single words:
These items are available in black and white, red and yellow, and blue and green.
The Oxford comma is also known as the ‘serial comma’.

Style guides differ on whether or not the Oxford comma should be used (as noted above, it’s optional and depends on house-style), and it’s more common in US than in UK English.

I don’t use the serial comma unless it’s needed to avoid ambiguity, as in the second example above.

I used to use it, until I started working with a team of translators whose house style was to omit it. A clear case of grammar fickleness.

The Wikipedia entry gives you more information on serial commas than you’d ever have thought possible. And “Oxford Comma” is also the title of a song by Vampire Weekend.

By Marian Dougan

If the shoe doesn’t fit (2): eggcorns and etymology

“Shoe-in”, Ben Zimmer points out, belongs to a special family of errors called “eggcorns”: misspellings, mis-hearings or misinterpretations of standard (often idiomatic) words or sayings. Their name itself derives from a misspelling of “acorn”. As Ben explains in Shifting Idioms: An Eggcornucopia,

eggcorns might eventually reach folk-etymological permanence, or they might continue to be considered nonstandard errors, albeit creative ones.

They have also been described as:

tiny little poems, a symptom of human intelligence and creativity.

They’ve even got their own special database called the Eggcorn Database. Not very imaginative, but I suppose eggcorns are imaginative enough in their own right not to need a fancy database name.

You can see and hear Ben Zimmer explaining eggcorns in an ABC News feature celebrating National Dictionary Day (16 October, the birthday of Noah Webster)

Warning: Do NOT follow any of these links if you’re meant to be working as opposed to wurfing or cyberslacking.

By Marian Dougan

If the shoe doesn’t fit: getting the etymology right

Mosaic shoeBen Zimmer’s latest On Language column in the New York Times (Beach-Blanket Lingo, 5 August 2010) examines the terms used by coastal resort residents (from-heres) to describe summer visitors (come-heres). One term used for the latter is shoobies, explained thus by John T. Cunningham, writing in 1958:

day-trippers from Philly took advantage of the $1 round-trip fare to make excursions to the shore, especially on Sundays. That day, week in and week out, found swaying Atlantic City-bound coaches teeming with Philadelphia families, laden with their ‘shoe box lunches’.

This got me thinking about another shoe-related term. A few years ago, when I was fretting about a translation project I’d bid for, a friend reassured me I’d be a “shoe-in”. I’d never heard the phrase before, and found it puzzling.

It brought to mind Cinderella easing her dainty foot into that delicate glass slipper.  The only problem being that I take an Italian size 41. So more like the ugly sisters trying to force those fragile shoes to fit their feet. Or, if you read the gorier versions of the fairy-tale, chopping off their heels or big toes to force the foot to fit the shoe. An image that did not auger well for that translation project.

Anyway, it seems “shoe-in” isn’t the correct term. The phrase is “shoo-in”. Here’s an explanation from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

Shoo-in ‘easy winner (especially in politics)’ (1939) was originally a horse that wins a race by pre-arrangement (1928; the verb phrase shoo in in this sense is from 1908).

And here’s one from The Word Detective, who has been writing about Words and Language in a Humorous Vein on the web since 1995:

‘Shoo in’, as it is properly spelled, was originally a racetrack term, and was (and still is) applied to a horse expected to easily win a race, and, by extension, to any contestant expected to win an easy victory. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the term in print dates back to 1928, and the original sense of the term was not as innocent as you’d think. A ‘shoo in’ was originally a horse that was expected to win a race, not by virtue of its speed or endurance, but because the race was fixed. The sardonic ‘subtext’ of the original usage, now lost, was that the designated horse would win even if it were so lackadaisical in its performance that it simply wandered somehow up to the finish line and had to be ‘shooed in’ to victory.

So, looks like my feet need fear nothing more violent than the footfile wielded by the podiatrist at Shuropody.

Mosaic shoe courtesy of Chris Zonta.

By Marian Dougan

Taking care of dem bones

Dem bonesMy last post was triggered by my husband Vito being diagnosed with Deep Vein Thrombosis. Since then (last Friday, to be exact), my lovely Mum has fallen and fractured the neck of her femur. She’s had an operation and is now going through painful physiotherapy and rehabilitation.

My mum’s 85 and has become very frail recently, so bone fragility was to be expected. I’d always thought that the sequence of events was: old age>weak bones and frailty>fall>breaks and fractures. But it turns out that if you have osteoporosis, your bones sometimes simply crumble (this can happen to your spine) or break by themselves, as a result of a twisting movement, say. So it can be the bone breaking that causes the fall. Alarming, isn’t it?

Osteoporosis can also lead to tooth loss. An article by Carole Palmer, a professor at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, points out that:

Teeth are held in the jaw by the face bone, which can also be affected by osteoporosis. ‘So, the jaw can also suffer the consequences of a diet lacking essential nutrients such as calcium and vitamins D and K’.

Diet is important for bone health: too much salt, alcohol, caffein or protein (protein??? who knew?) can weaken your bones. Physical activity is beneficial:

Bones get stronger when you use them. The best way to strengthen them is to do at least five hours of ‘weight-bearing’ exercise a week. This includes walking, running, dancing, golf, tennis or netball. It doesn’t include cycling or swimming (although swimming is good for staying flexible).
Bones also benefit if you lift and carry things. Weight training is ideal, but carrying shopping, gardening and housework all count.

So along with all our feet paddling, ankle circling and buttock clenching to keep our circulation – and veins – healthy, those of us with sedentary jobs should be exercising for our bone health too. But I’ll skip the housework and carrying shopping (unless it’s clothes, shoes and other goodies), thanks.

Here are some useful tips on maintaining “Strong bones at every age” (thank you yet again, NHS).

Photo of dinosaur bones at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, courtesy of Jan’s Cat (thank you, Felix!)

By Marian Dougan

Keeping healthy at your desk

My husband’s just been diagnosed with Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) and has come home from the outpatient’s department with a well-designed, simply-written care and information pack.

Flicking through the Patient Information Booklet, I found the following DVT-prevention exercises, similar to the ones recommended for airline passengers. I thought they might be useful for all of us desk-workers. I’ve added some exercises for neck and shoulders, and a couple suggested by Vito himself (the irony of Vito getting DVT is that he’s a former sports coach and physically active!). These exercises can all be done sitting at your desk.

Ankles

Paddle your feet up and down and circle them round and round.

Starting with feet flat on floor, raise your ankles (so pointing your feet, as if you’re standing on tiptoes). Lower your ankles and raise your toes (flexing your feet).

Knees

Brace your knees back so that you can feel the muscle tighten on the front of the thigh. Hold for a count of three and then gently relax. Your knee caps should move slightly.

Bottom

Clench you buttock muscles together and hold for a count of 3 before relaxing.

Neck and shoulders

Sit up straight as you work. Shoulders back and down, chin down (not thrusting forward), back of neck long, imaginary string pulling up from crown of head.

Circle head slowly, first in one direction then the other, starting with small circles and gradually increasing. You might hear some crackling going on in your neck – don’t worry. Unless your head falls off, in which case call a doctor immediately.

Sitting up straight, turn your head to look first over your right shoulder, then your left.

Lower head first to one side, back to upright, then to other side (as though trying to rest your ear on your shoulder). Don’t raise your shoulder.

Circle your shoulders first in one direction then the other (shrugging them up towards your ears at the top of the circle and squeezing your shoulder-blades down and towards each other as you lower).

Arms

Keeping your upper arms close to your sides, raise your forearms so that your hands are level with your shoulders.

The DVT leaflet advises repeating the above exercises 10 times each and every hour. If that’s too much, select some from each category and alternate them between one session and the next. Some of these exercises are illustrated in this feature from Italy’s la Repubblica newspaper

Breathing

Place your hands on the side of your rib cage. Take a deep breath and feel your ribs being pushed out to the side as you expand your lungs. Do this 3 or 4 times every hour. This will help ensure you get a good exchange of air in the bottom pockets of your lungs. (It sounds similar to the Pilates breath, where, as you breathe out by pushing ribs down and in, you also pull in the core muscles (abdomen and waist) and pull up the pelvic floor).

General

Get up from your desk every now and again and stretch or walk about.

We all know we should do these exercises – how many of us do?

Postscript 1: If you’d like more information on health and fitness, you can contact Vito directly: vito at informafitness co uk

Postscript 2: Our family’s having a National Health Service week of it, as my mother is also having health problems. She’s just out of hospital but may have to be re-admitted. I’d like to say here that I think our Health Service is truly wonderful – certainly here in Glasgow. We’ve had such wonderful help and care from all the staff concerned. We are very, very lucky. I love the NHS.

By Marian Dougan