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 'wikipedia'
The city of Derby, Iowa: population 131
The Wikipedia page on Derby, Iowa begins:Derby is a city in Lucas County, Iowa, United States. The population was 131 at the 2000 census.A city with 131 inhabitants! That made me laugh. Even St David's, the UK's smallest city, has a population of 1,8...
Wikipedia vandalism and old folks in Tolworth
I use Wikipedia quite a lot, and only occasionally spot acts of vandalism. But here's one possible example, from the entry on Tolworth (check out the final sentence - and click on the image to see a larger version):Yes, it says: "I have been here and...
The Nordics - and Scandinavia
A recent email from our CEO talked about "plans to sell our businesses in the Nordics". The Nordics?I'd thought that 'the Nordic countries' and 'Scandinavia' were synonyms (if I'd thought about it at all), but it appears that the former term almost a...
King's Cliffe, King's Cliff, Kings Cliff, Kingscliffe
I've had another serendipitous Wikipedia discovery: the entry on Kings Cliffe, Northamptonshire.As the entry says, this village is "variously King's Cliffe, King's Cliff, Kings Cliff, Kingscliffe".I don't have my gazetteer to hand, but both Google Ma...
Camel case
I'd heard of 'upper case' and 'lower case', obviously, but not of 'camel case' until our web editor enlightened me recently.It's one of a number of names for the practice of using capital letters in the middle of (usually compound) words – 'iPod', ...
