Month: April 2009

“Work Stoppage”

Euphemisms

I saw this the other day in an announcement from AT&T about its negotiations with the CWA union about union contracts.

“Work Stoppage” is a euphemism for “Strike”.

Contrary to my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis, AT&T chose a three-syllable, twelve-letter, two-word phrase over a one-syllable, six-letter single word that says the same thing.

But that is a frequent characteristic of euphemisms: People go out of their way to avoid what they believe will be perceived negatively.

If you find yourself saying or writing a long phrase when you know that a shorter phrase or a single word will express the same thing, notice whether you are trying to hide a negative perception behind that long phrase.

Thank you, PhotoPeach, for your slideshow award!

General

“Better Communication for Smart People” is the theme of this website.

And I devote most of my blog posts to the English language.

But there is more to communication than human languages.

One avenue for better communication that we have on the Internet is the use of a photo-sharing site.

I have gotten accounts at several photo-sharing sites over the years, and each site offers certain advantages.

My latest account is at PhotoPeach.com, which offers two distinguishing features:

  1. It simplifies the addition of music to a slideshow.
  2. It provides a “swirlable” view of a sequence of photos.

Although PhotoPeach is not perfect — no photo-sharing site is, in my opinion — I found it nearly perfect for quickly assembling a slideshow about the Amazon Kindle 2 at my Kindle2Tricks.com website.

And PhotoPeach liked my slideshow so much that they gave me an award!

It truly was very simple to create the slideshow with the music and the titles.

If you are looking for a slideshow-centric photo-sharing site, then I recommend PhotoPeach.com as one to consider.

Why do people pluralize company names?

Plurals, Possessives

I hear and see a lot of pluralization of company names.

Here are some examples.

Many people pluralize J.D. Power and Associates as “J.D. Powers” — as in, “They won the J.D. Powers award three times.”

Many people pluralize Barnes & Noble as “Barnes & Nobles” — as in, “Did you see that book at Barnes & Nobles?”

Many people pluralize Kroger as “Krogers” — as in, “I am going to Krogers. Do you need anything?”

And what sounds sometimes like a possessive-apostrophe-“s” is often written simply with an “s”, so I know that not everyone is trying to make the name into a possessive.