THE TOP TENS- Ten words to cut from your writing

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THE TOP TENS- Ten words to cut from your writing

SHANNA MALLON

Ten_words_to_cut_from_your_writing

Entrepreneur.com

Published Friday, Apr. 11 2014, 5:00 AM EDT

Last updated Wednesday, Apr. 30 2014, 11:06 AM EDT

As Mark Twain famously wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” His point? Strong writing is lean writing.

When you want to make your writing more powerful, cut out words you don’t need – such as the 10 included in this post:

Copyright © 2014 Entrepreneur Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Shanna Mallon is a writer for Straight North, a Chicago Web design firm providing specialized SEO, Web development, and other online marketing services. Follow Straight North on Twitter and Facebook.

English Is Crazy!

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Published on Apr 1, 2014
Seriously…the English language is insane.
SUBSCRIBE! http://bit.ly/1eA5JCm
Follow Me! http://bit.ly/15J7ube & http://bit.ly/18Lnfme

Sources:

Richard Lederer’s “Crazy English”
http://amzn.to/1pB5Rrj

Richard Krogh’s “The English Lesson”
http://www.cupola.com/html/wordplay/e…

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Science & Technology
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Standard YouTube License

A New Addition to the Reading List

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A New Addition to the Reading List

After looking through some of my books, I found one that I believe to be quite valuable: A Pocket Style Manual by Diana Hacker. And it will be going into the Improving Your Own Writing section of the reading list.

For those of you who do not know this book, it teaches clarity, grammar, punctuation and mechanics, research, MLA, APA, Chicago, and usage/grammatical terms. It’s good for those who have difficulty writing essays.

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8 food idioms that are right under your nose

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8 food idioms that are right under your nose

1. Nutshell

The term in a nutshell refers to a short description, or a story told in no more words than can physically fit in the shell of a nut. But the origin of the term tests those limits with the most long winded of tales. The ancient Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder claimed that a copy of Homer’s The Iliad existed that was small enough to fit inside a walnut shell. Almost 2000 years later in the early 1700s the Bishop of Avranches tested Pliny’s theory by writing out the epic in tiny handwriting on a walnut-sized piece of paper and lo and behold, he did it!

2. Beans

English speakers have been using the word “spill” to mean “divulge secret information” since 1547, but the spilling of beans in particular may predate the term by millennia. Many historians claim that secret societies in ancient Greece voted by dropping black or white beans into a clay urn. To spill those beans would be to reveal the results of a secret vote before the ballots had been counted. Kidney he lives, pinto he dies!

3. Pie

As many of us know from experience, it is not so easy to make a pie. A buttery crust can fall apart in the deftest of hands and around Thanksgiving many pumpkin “pies” might be more accurately deemed pumpkin “soups.” On the other hand (or for our purposes) anyone can become an expert at eating a pie. Popularized in the U.S. in the late 1800s, the most notable use of pie to mean “simple and pleasurable” appears in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Part of our next food idiom makes a home in many pies, especially in America.

4. Apples

Apples and oranges refers to two incommensurable items, i.e. a comparison of things that cannot be compared. Though they are both fruits, apples and oranges are separated by color, taste, juiciness and 89.2 million years of evolution. The idiom first appeared as apples and oysters in John Ray’s 1670 Proverb collection, and equivalent terms exist in many languages: “grandmothers and toads” in Serbian to “love and the eye of an axe” in Argentine Spanish. What other funny fruits turn unusual phrases?

5. Bananas

Not only does going bananas mean “to go crazy,” the term can point to things for whichyou’ve gone bananas, or obsessions. According to lexicographer E.J. Lighter, going bananas refers to the term going ape often used in American popular culture in the second half of the 1900s. Apes were seen as crazy by the mid-century media, and what do apes eat? Bananas! For example, here at Dictionary.com, we’re bananas for grammar but we go bananas when people end sentences with prepositions.

6. Tea

Though English is spoken all over the world, there are certain idioms that recall its, well, Englishness. Popularized in British Edwardian slang, cup of tea originally referred to something pleasant or agreeable. The negative usage as in not my cup of tea arose during World War II as a more polite way to say you didn’t like something. “You dont say someone gives you a pain in the neck,” explained Alister Cooke in his 1944 Letter from America. You just remark, he’s not my cup of tea.'”

7. Cheese

Perhaps the savoriest idiom on this list, the word cheese can refer to a person or thing that is important or splendid as well as to the delicious dairy product. The usage is thought to have origins in Urdu, from the Persian chiz meaning “thing.” In common usage, “the big cheese” is a person of importance or authority, and cheese is often associated with smiling, based on the “say cheese” method of posing for pictures.

8. Eggshells

Our final idiom is our most delicate: walking on eggshells or taking great care not to upset someone. It is thought to have originated in politics when diplomats were described as having the remarkable ability to tread so lightly around difficult situations, it was as though they were walking on eggshells. In a nutshell, we hope you go bananas for food idioms. Whether or not they’re your cup of tea, these terms are easy as pie to use and they’ll make you the big cheese of any conversation! So go ahead and spill the beans, it’s just like apples and oranges.

(I found this on dictionary.com.)

Anybody have anymore?

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