Optimality!

Especially the last part about fill words such as ‘um’ and other linguistic slips is interesting and fun. Listen to it here.

Apple has the answer: Knowledge base article HT2300.

As the title of this post — Analysis of Text Jumbling and Legibility — demonstrates, jumbled text is not always as legible as is the widespread (mis)belief spurred by frequent mass mailings with texts like this:

When you read articles or listen to podcasts about digital music in general or iTunes and DRM in particular, you will notice that nearly everybody talks about “digital downloads”. People never talk about just downloads, as if it was special that they are digital.
Now, when you talk about music, then the qualifier digital makes a [...]

A coworker just pointed out this site to me: Common Errors in English. A treasure chest for someone obsessed with proper use of language.
Also very interesting is this list of non-errors!
Enjoy!

Tags: english, Language

Notice something funny with this sentence? Correct. At a first glance it does not make much sense. It probably should read:
This appointment occurred in the past.
Well, unfortunately the case is not quite as straightforward.

As pointed out, my last language post was not about homonyms, but this one is.

Your usage of the word their that is. As in my earlier post about minimum/maximum/criterion, their should be added to the endangered species list of the English vocabulary.

Of course there is no such thing as criterias. Nor are there maximas or minimas. If you had had the opportunity to have Latin in high school you would know that the word form ending in -a designates the plural form, while the -um designates the singular. Criterion being an exception, probably because the language [...]