Those that know me in person know I love puns and wordplay. I can generally be found giggling at something which amuses me which I then have to explain to others who hadn’t noticed it, or in some cases had but hadn’t been amused and then are annoyed at me explaining it to them. To quote Brian Keenan in Blind Flight

The Englishman is funny,’ he says, ‘He makes me laugh. The Irishman is witty, he makes me think.’

I’ll dump a few random pieces here so that if I don’t get back to the subject I have at least written something about it.

Lisp

A lisp is a speech impediment which causes people to have trouble pronouncing the letter S. The word lisp has difficulty being pronounced without using said letter. Which cruel shit decided to name it so?

Speech impediment

Seeing the wikipedia article on lisp reminded me of number 2 on the list: speech impediment. See: lisp, how does someone with a stammer communicate they have a speech impediment with dignity? Again with the cruelty etc.

Abbreviation

An abbreviation is a shortened version of a word. Doctor may be abbreviated to Dr. You can see the clever wee bit of HTML there? That allows you to expand the text using a variety of means to see the full version of the word. The HTML tag for abbreviations is abbreviated to <abbr> due to length.

There were others I had come across and neglected to put up. Do you have a favourite ironic word or phrase? Maybe you call an ambulance when you hear some illiterate prat exclaim my arm has just literally fallen off?. Post yours in the comments.

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I rarely text and when I do I try to, on a shit keyboard, use correct spelling. I understand that two differs in meaning from to and too. I don’t understand compromising a 2 or 3 character word into 1. Paying by the character are we? R is a letter, are is a word.

From the ever reliable Wikipedia

Communication is commonly defined as “the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs…”, 1: an act or instance of transmitting and 3 a: “a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior … also: exchange of information”.

It is thus with disdain I read of the imminent re-branding of the SciFi channel.

SciFi is an abbreviation of Science Fiction. The new name will be SyFy, which is not. Additionally, it sounds like an abbreviation of a venereal disease. Apparantly this is what the hip kids would abbreviate Science Fiction to.

Nonsense.

SyFy barely comes up on a search and in fact doesn’t seem to appear before the last month or so.

Under what circumstances would you compress Science Fiction to SyFy? I don’t understand the International Phonetic Alphabet but would that not be a completely different pronunciation?

When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it … It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.

Let’s look at this:

Who are the techno savvy kids? Are they trying to appeal to dance music fans or something.

It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip

Eurgh!

And finally: which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.

This is marketing fuckwit for which was our aim. Maybe he wants to touch base with someone offline to collaborate on a making yourself look like a twat solution.

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