Dispatches...

[itsjustaname]

Saturday - The long weekend began, and all long weekends should, with baking. Mmm... Cinnamon Swedishes. silenttex has suggested a couple of improvements (sultanas and more cinnamon), I shall report back with the results once we've tried them out.

Sunday - Sunday was brought to you by the letters N, C, I and S. Lounging around watching NCIS season 1 on DVD

Comments

[trampledamage]

And I must remember to go shopping in time for your jollies!

Love the article on Finnish swearing - that's a site I will definitely be going back to.

[itsjustaname]

It's great, Mark Liberman's articles are generally in the same amusing vein - if you're bored one day, stroll through the archives for the article about German's being miserable because of umlauts. There's a bunch of them and they're very funny.

[trampledamage]

Sounds good to me!

btw- if that's the meaning of the word 'phatic' - do you know what the actual meaning of "emphatic" is? (as in how the two relate)

[itsjustaname]

They don't really (although I suppose they might if you go back far enough). I've had a quick squizzy at the various etymology & dictionary sites I have in my arsenal and none of them link the two.

Your friend and mine, Bartley has it that phatic is from the Greek phatos meaning to speak, while emphasis is from the latin, from the Greek, emphainein meaning to display.

[sushidog]

Lovely to see you on Thursday!
I love Eats Shoots and Leaves; great book. I have tried, in vain, to encourage my students to read it, as some of them have, shall we say, a highly decorative approach to punctuation. They write without it, and then generously sprinkle commas and full stops, apparently at random. *shudder*

[itsjustaname]

It's a fab book isn't it? I remember when it first came out, I was amazed that I wasn't given loads of copies for Christma. I had visions of everyone I knew seeing it and thinking they must get it for me as it had me written all over it! webcowgirl gave me the page-a-day calendar last year so now I get a dose of punctuation humour every day at work.

The thing I have to deal with most in my work is the business-writing habit of capitalising key nouns in a sentence. Drives me nuts!

[sushidog]

the business-writing habit of capitalising key nouns in a sentence.
My students do that too, although I had one who insisted on "including" quotation marks around any "word" she wasn't "sure" about, or that she wanted to "emphasise". To be honest, I found I couldn't help reading her essays in a sarcastic tone of voice! :-)

[itsjustaname]

*laughs*

Yes the random use of quotation marks in advertising has a similar effect. When products are listed as "Salt and vinegar" flavour, I wonder what flavour they are really.