Some thoughts on a cold day in December:
:: I’m seeing “Best of 2011” posts all over blogland. The very thought of going back through all my posts and figuring that out exhausts me. If you’d like to visit my archives, have at it. I won’t be doing a “Best of” post. (I can barely remember why I just got up to go to the kitchen.)
:: This one has always bugged me. When I see a bumper sticker or anything else that says, “I (heart shape) something,” I read that as “I love.” Isn’t that what it’s supposed to mean? When we were young and we wrote our initials and made a heart and then added the initials of whoever was our latest crush, we were saying, “Claudia loves so-and-so.” Not “Claudia hearts so-and-so.” But everywhere I turn, someone is writing the word ‘heart’ instead of what the heart symbolizes – love.
It makes me nuts.You can love, but you can’t heart. Heart is not a verb, it’s a noun.
:: I’ve been itching to write this for a long time. I understand that correct spelling doesn’t come easily to everyone, but in this high-tech age we all have spell check or a dictionary as part of our computers. I see this particular error everywhere in blogland and on Craig’s List. Please, please, please: it’s Dining room, not Dinning Room. A dinning room (if there was such a word) would be a room where a lot of noise is made.
:: What’s with news programs fudging the facts? I see this every so often on CNN and I know it happens elsewhere. The talking head makes a sweeping statement that simply isn’t true. It may be partly true, but a quick bit of research will prove that it isn’t entirely true. Or it might be out-and-out wrong. Here’s an example: Last night we were watching the local evening news, which in our part of the country comes out of New York City. That’s a big market with well paid anchors. The anchor was talking about Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey, who is apparently stumping for Mitt Romney. He made a reference to Christies’s ‘having withdrawn from the Presidential race.’ He never was in the race. There was a lot of press speculation about Christie’s presidential aspirations several months back and a lot of air time was taken up with all that, but he never entered the race. Considering a run is not the same as running. You can’t withdraw from something you never entered. Word choices matter. Shouldn’t a newsperson know more about political facts than me?
Am I being too picky? I don’t think so. News organizations have a responsibility to report the facts. Even a little fuzzy reporting is too much. Walter Cronkite must be rolling over in his grave over what passes as reporting nowadays.
Okay, enough complaining.
I have a project in mind for this. I need to think it through and buy a few components. I’m not sure which way I will go with it….stay tuned.
