Toots for stancarey@mastodon.ie account

Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-22 at 17:52

The Strunk cost fallacy:

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2025/01/22/the-strunk-cost-fallacy/

[#]language #books #EnglishUsage #writing #WritingCommunity #blog #neologisms #grammar #prescriptivism

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-22 at 11:32

"Most of us, most of the time, are unaware of how language does its work." —Neil Postman, Technopoly

[#]language #NeilPostman #books

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-21 at 12:33

How likely is an Amoc collapse? Good article laying out the research and the risks:

https://www.ft.com/content/7711109e-0338-43ad-aada-853f058a24f1

Archived copy: https://archive.ph/sMKsz

[#]climate #Amoc #meteorology #ClimateCrisis #ClimateBreakdown #ClimateEmergency

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-20 at 19:03

"We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first."

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)

[#]books #writing #SFF #ScienceFiction #UrsulaKLeGuin #quote

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-20 at 18:31

"We forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is....We don't educate for freedom."

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[#]books #writing #SFF #ScienceFiction #politics #UrsulaKLeGuin #quote

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-20 at 17:56

The plot sickens

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-19 at 11:19

Climbed Nephin yesterday, Ireland's tallest standalone mountain. Terrain is mixed: forest path, famine road, bog and heather, rough scree, etc.

The main route up is from the north, so we were in shadow the whole way and ascended into a cloud. Very cold and wild at the peak, so we didn't linger there.

Had a lovely big bowl of soup in the Old Post Office in Crossmolina after. A good day out.

[#]Nephin #mountain #Ireland mountains #CountyMayo #climbing #hiking #outdoors #LandscapePhotography

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-17 at 15:52

Today in: It's Usually Older Than You Think

Horace Walpole's "With all sorts of queer feels about me" (correspondence, c.1746) is the oldest recorded use of "feels" as a noun, per OED

[#]words #language #feels #OED

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-17 at 13:13

By Grabthar's hammer, today I'm prefacing random statements with the phrase "By Grabthar's hammer"

[#]GalaxyQuest #AlanRickman #SFF #film #movies

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-16 at 19:47

What a brilliant artist, what a beautiful person he was

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/david-lynch-dead-director-blue-velvet-twin-peaks-1236276106/

[#]DavidLynch

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-12 at 08:20

I haven't read many novelizations of films but heard good things about this one. Mann is a pseudonym for Leslie Waller. (The film won its only Oscar for best original screenplay, based on a Life magazine article.)

[#]books #CrimeFiction #reading #DogDayAfternoon #FilmBooks #BookCovers

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-10 at 15:37

Dead wood is full of life:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/05/secrets-of-dead-wood-how-old-trees-hold-key-to-new-life-aoe

[#]trees #wood #ecology #environment #nature #forest #forestry

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-10 at 14:56

What does "CPD" mean to you? Today, at work, I've seen it refer to both "continuing professional development" AND "cable position device". (Separate texts!)

[#]AmEditing #abbreviations #copyediting #initialisms #acronyms #words

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-08 at 18:19

The verb "incent" seems to really exasp and antag people

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-08 at 13:01

Woodcut by M.C. Escher, 1919 (163 × 251 mm)

[#]cats #woodcut #Escher #MCEscher #art #ArtHistory

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-07 at 18:33

"That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality."

A line from @jeffvandermeer's Annihilation has hung around to haunt us

[#]books #Annihilation #quote #JeffVanderMeer

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-07 at 17:10

A good read or listen: @molly0xfff on @wikipedia's "stubborn independence" and the recent right-wing efforts to denigrate it:

https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war-on-wikipedia/

[#]Wikipedia #propaganda #politics #information #internet

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-06 at 19:18

I'm on Bluesky at stancarey.bsky.social and am more active there than before.

Current activity on Bluesky: recommending that people join Mastodon ¯_(ツ)_/¯ #bluesky

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-06 at 18:26

AWKNESS sounds like a millennial coinage, but it's a word centuries old meaning "wrongness, irrationality, perversity, untowardness, awkwardness, ineptitude".

That definition is from the OED, which labels AWKNESS obsolete. But it's been reinvented: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/awkness-an-old-word-made-new-again/

[#]etymology #words #language #slang

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Written by Stan Carey on 2025-01-06 at 13:32

New Year's resolutions for editors and proofreaders. I wrote these for AFEPI Ireland a couple of years ago; some apply more broadly to freelance or office work:

https://afepi-ireland.com/blog/new-years-resolutions-for-editors-and-proofreaders/

[#]editing #proofreading #copyediting #freelance #words #language #work #NewYear #resolutions #NewYearsResolutions

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