Recent Posts
The Engine Room
Return To Blog Listing
A blog about English language use, publishing and the media in general – brought to you by a sub-editor (copy editor) on a weekly UK magazine and his former chief sub.
If you have a question about vocabulary, grammar or punctuation, why not ask
Recent Posts Tagged With 'twitter'
Website Failure Alert (NSFW?)
More correspondence, this time an email I received in my official capacity as web production editor. It was from our, um, "obscenity checker" at work. I'm assuming that's a program rather than a person.Anyway, under the heading Website Failure Alert ...
BBC finally assumes people know what Twitter is
A few weeks ago the BBC News website ran a story entitled Hundreds on Armstrong Tweet ride. It began:About 300 people have joined an impromptu bike ride with cycling legend Lance Armstrong after he issued an open invitation on a Twitter postInteresti...
Twitter evidence that GCSEs are easy
Evidence from Twitter that GCSE exams are easy:Among Twitter's trending topics a few hours ago were GCSE, A's, B's and C's - but not D's and E's.Or it could be that there's a correlation between Twitter use and academic excellence... ...
Old story about tea is one of BBC's 'most popular'
Here's the BBC News website's 'most popular stories now' widget from the start of the week:What's interesting is that story eight, "Tea 'healthier' drink than water", actually dates from August 2006:For it to resurface as one of the Beeb's most popul...
Shill and squelette
A couple of recent finds:First, a BBC News Magazine article on 'shill reviewing'. I've never come across the AmE word 'shill' before but I have encountered a few shill (or false) customer reviews in my time. The article also lists some other striking...
Reporter wins Nobel Prize. Sorry, I mean Pulitzer
A bit of confusion in this Wired PR News story between a Pulitzer Prize and a Nobel Prize (as usual, click to see a larger image):To be fair, Wired PR News spotted its mistake and offered a correction the following day, although the story with its or...
The Apprentice and Lorraine Tighe's eyes
As you probably know if you read this blog regularly, I love the reality TV show The Apprentice. What I don't love is when one of the contestants candidates wears glasses and a columnist for a national paper writes tosh such as this:The rival team's ...
Blikey, a gikey!
A couple of weeks back I spotted the word 'blikey' (a portmanteau of 'blimey' and 'crikey') being used on Twitter. Quite taken with the word, I tweeted about it myself – remarking that it was probably rather confusing to users of American English.N...
