Recent Posts
Jack Yan on Vox
Return To Blog Listing
Personal addenda from Jack Yan, supplementing his work blog, with posts on humour, politics, the media, cars and anything else that might be of interest.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'english'
Where’s the I?
Time elapsed for compose window to appear: about ten seconds. Have they fixed it? (Last time I asked that, I jinxed it, and the next load took something like 16 hours.) I was at Newtown Mall last week (not a regular shopping ...
Out with the pen
Yay, the compose screen! It only took nine hours for it to come up, rather than 16 since the blackout before. Here’s something else I wanted to share, before I realized that these screens only come up for a few minutes before th...
Cry the beloved country
On Google News yesterday (during the Vox blackout): Nigeria: the Country might have slipped, but I wonder where Nigeria: the Movie is, and Nigeria: the Flame Thrower (the kids love that one). Apparently, we topped this index, w...
ABC puts Oprah’s spelling back
Oprah Winfrey was named for Orpah in the Hebrew Bible, but a spelling mistake led to her unique name, one which is in the global consciousness today. (Search for Orpah and Google asks if you are searching for Oprah.) I’m sure she...
Selling Cobra 11 in English
Action Concept, the crowd that makes Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei, has an English trailer for the show on its site. I am surprised no English channel has ever picked up the long-running series. Sure, it’s devoid of real...
Maybe it was originally in Spanish and got lost in translation
Can someone please explain this first paragraph on the Think Spain site? Clocks go back an hour this weekend, in the early hours of Sunday morning, as Europe says goodbye to British Summer Time and adopts daylight saving time (Greenwich Mean Time......
Did City Life get it right this time?
Remember last year when I took the mickey out of these in the City Life newspaper? The first one is obvious: Melbourne is misspelt. The second one is also obvious: Circle is misspelt, there’s a missing apostrophe ...
Higgins’ nuts
A pity that John Hillerman is still putting on his English accent and Magnum, PI Higgins persona in this 1989 TVC. I expected to hear his original Texan drawl. Read and post comments | Send to a friend ...
Going back across the Pond
We were chatting about non-US actors adopting American accents on Jaklumen’s blog and I thought of several American actors who do pretty good English accents. First u...
What is C02?
This is as disturbing as when I began to see American publications capitalize after colons in 2001 (which is generally incorrect, according to US publishing professionals I ask...
Here’s Lucy
Carrying on from a post that Jaklumen made on his blog, I went to look for the Lucy Lawless-headed Greenpeace campaign to reduce emissions. This is Lucy Lawless as Lucy Lawless, and her accent has changed a great deal since I saw her...
Who is this ‘John Simms’ guy?
Linda-Joy pointed me to this article about John Simm in The Independent: Who on earth is John Simms? A bit embarrassing to have a typo in the headline. I assume he is also known to the fictional New Zealand locksmith–prime minis...
Neill Blomkamp must be delighted to learn that this is how his name is spelt
Remember how a few weeks back, I chided Examiner.com for a poorly written review of District 9? The writer of the review told us how a chap called ‘Neill Blomcamp’ directed the film, and invented new words such as gansters, proli...
What’s a restauranter?
This is from the Willis Street site, and I quite like the image and the typeface choice: English might be my second language, but I am pretty sure there is no such word as restauranter. Unless there’s a new word out ther...
District 9: life in the demon state
The writer of this review of District 9, Andrew Ricks Jr, has good phrasing, and seems to know his stuff. However, it reveals that someone did not do any checking at the Examiner, whether it’s the writer (I am the first to admit it...
Seek, and ye shall find typos
How embarrassing for sits vac site Seek: No one taught the copywriter how to pluralize. And this may be Firefox’s fault, but when I tried to find out more about Seek, I got a page with this gibberish: It doesn’t give me t...
Slang time
The British and the Americans are separated by a common language. Ellen Degeneres and Hugh Laurie—yes, he of Jeeves and Wooster, The Black Adder, and some medical drama (only kidding)—compare British and American slang in this cl...
