Author: Kirk

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.

“A prestige watch is part of your image.”

Adjectives, Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

I saw this in the subject line of a spam email message a week ago.

But this statement means nothing except for the positive implication that the spammer wants to give it.

Someone usually says a statement such as “It is a prestige product.” to tell the listener that “it” is a high-prestige product.

But the noun “prestige” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “A prestige watch is part of your image.”?

This statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “prestige” must be hyphenated with an adjective to form a compound adjective that can indicate the value of the noun — in this case, “watch” — that the compound adjective modifies.

In contrast to the inherently meaningless statement “A prestige watch is part of your image.”, here are some meaningful statements:

  • “A high-prestige watch should be part of your image.”
  • “A low-prestige watch should not be part of your image.”
  • “A prestigious watch should be part of your image.”

I believe that the use of the noun “prestige” in place of the adjective “prestigious” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to speak or write the two-syllable, eight-letter noun than it is to speak or write the three-syllable, eleven-letter adjective.

So respond with a “Huh?” the next time that someone says to you a statement such as “It is a prestige product.”, and see what happens.