Vocabulary word of the day: "misprision"

This was a new one for me.

In a Huffington Post article about police shooting civilians in New Orleans, post-Katrina, this paragraph:


I hadn't ever seen that word before, so I went to dictionary.com and found:






In simple terms, official cover-up. So there you are. We learn something new every day.

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Badly worded charity ads

Recently, we received this in the mail:



At first glance, this appears to be an innocent request for money for cancer research, BUT!! Then there is this bit:


So... support the youth cancer centre and we will make sure that from now on, adults will have a better chance of surviving cancer than kids. It's only fair.

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Communication is everything

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[Pet Hate] "shot dead" @newsaustralia

Just watching the Channel 9 afternoon news, and the story about the Chang killer being deported to Malaysia. In summary, the newsreader said, "when Victor Chang was shot dead".

This is one of the phrases which always leads to me shouting at the TV.

Technically, he was either shot when he was already dead, or he died as a result of being shot. It's a curiously unique usage, as no one is ever "knifed dead" or "drowned dead".

It's sloppy, at best.

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When Lost & Tangled in Your Own Sentence...

...check your punctuation.

From Shadowplay, by Tad Williams:

He felt he would carry her memory even into the darkest house, [...] but all, the other things that he had been taught were so important had been were revealed to be only beads on a fraying string.

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Typo irony

If you're going to make fun of someone else's typo, read and re-read your own post:



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Connotation is Important

In a recent news story about a schlub who was blackmailing women online, the following:



"implored"?


No. "persuaded"? "convinced"?

Definitely not "implored".

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