Tuesday Rambly Bits

[gnomi]

-- After meeting mabfan today for lunch, I went into Park St. station, where they're installing the new Charlie Card/Charlie Ticket machines. I asked the guy in the booth whether there was some mechanism for turning tokens into Charlie Tickets, since the T is still sending tokens as refunds when you send in an on-time-service claim. He said that the Charlie Card machines take tokens as payment.

-- I am bizarrely annoyed by people who use a comma to set off an apposive phrase but don't put in the second comma. For example:

Bob, the man I met yesterday has not called me back.

This actually impacts affects readability, and that ticks me off.

Yeah. I'm a punctuation nerd. I'm comfortable with that.

-- Pi-Con was a lot of fun. When I have more brain, I may type up a brief con report. Panels went well, for the most part. Spending an hour talking to terri_osborne about SG-1 and SGA was way, way fun. And the Small Press and Self Publishing panel (which I was on with saraphina_marie was also fun, as well as informative and well attended (it was my best-attended panel).

-- Me to eal: The birth control pill is the Mussolini of women's cycles.

-- tapuz and laurens10 gave me Hebrew magnetic poetry for my birthday. I am now trying to figure out where in my cube is the best place for various and sundry Hebrew sentences to randomly appear. Not that anyone in the office other than me (and visitors from the home office) would understand them, but they amuse me.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

My Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition, 1993) has "to have an impact on; impinge on" as one of the meanings of "impact," without any qualification. I've never had a problem with that use of the word.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

And here we have a beautiful illustration of the difference between descriptivist and prescriptivist dictionaries. Merriam-Webster is a descriptivist house -- they describe how the language is being used. Amercian Heritage is a prescriptivist house -- they describe how the language is "supposed" to be used, according to the prescriptions of the language experts.

I'm a prescriptivist, for the most part. And, thus, I prefer the American Heritage for usage information.