TATKOP 112

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who say 'someone has to do it' and those who say 'someone else has to do it'.

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Alternate - a small grief

Source: Know your meme

By guest explorer: Fred Shivvin

Have you ever corrected someone's dreadful grammar, fixed their awful punctuation, or pointed out that they used the wrong word?

I get it - those errors can be very irritating. They distract from the meaning. And certain errors are particularly 'triggering' for some of us. A whole online army seem fully occupied waging war against you're errors.

But have you ever considered that in your battle against errors, you might be fighting against the natural process of language change?

I'm starting to think I might be doing just that when I react to one of my 'trigger' words errors - alternate, the adjective form. I consider it an error to use alternate when the meaning is alternative.

I frequently notice alternate used wrongly in both formal and informal contexts, and I always correct it (at least to myself!) However, deep in my word nerd heart, I am starting to feel I might have to accept the word alternate is just changing its meaning, like so many have before.

But I'm not ready to accept it just yet.

TATKOP 111

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who bandage over their emotional wounds and those they hurt to avoid taking the bandage off.

See more in the TATKOP series.

Spurious - graphic propaganda

My love for graphs has a most unfortunate side-effect. I end up shouting and swearing at most news reports with line graphs, bar graphs or pie charts. Regularly. In fact, most days.

What I see are spurious graphs, and they make me angry.

Spurious means:

♦️  of illegitimate birth; bastard

♦️  outwardly similar or corresponding to something without having its genuine qualities; false

♦️  of falsified or erroneously attributed origin; forged; of a deceitful nature or quality.

Bastard, false, deceitful! Yep, they are some of the words I shout at the TV.

The figures are from real data, right? The plots and lines are mathematics, so how can you argue with them? They have a seductive power; their apparent objectivity gives us a sense of trust. 

Reserve that trust: graphs are all too often a tool of propaganda. 

Spurious graphs are aimed at deliberately fooling you.

TATKOP 110

There Are Two Kinds Of People - those who think everything is a miracle and those who think nothing is (Albert Einstein).

See more in the TATKOP series.

Green - another way to over-consume?

Green is such a versatile colour. 

It's my second favourite colour (after purple); it symbolises nature and the natural world. Green also represents tranquillity, good luck, health, and jealousy. It's an easy colour to live with.

Green is also a versatile adjective. Merriam-Webster provides ten different definitions just for the adjective form of green alone. It can mean the colour between yellow and blue on the light spectrum, covered in foliage, pleasant, youthful, unripe, envious, sickly, naive, unprocessed, and related to environmentalism. 

I want to talk about that tenth definition of green:

♦️ often capitalized: relating to or being an environmentalist political movement ♦️ concerned with or supporting environmentalism ♦️ tending to preserve environmental quality (as by being recyclable, biodegradable, or non-polluting)

Being green and supporting green ideas is becoming more mainstream. It used to be a fringe ideology, adopted by hippies and drop-outs. 

As green ideas have entered the mainstream, a new phenomenon known as greenwash has emerged. 

Greenwash involves pretending to be green in order to sell more.

But how can we detect this thin wash of 'green' over otherwise unchanged ideas and products?

TATKOP 109

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who see growing up as learning about the world and those who see it as learning about ourselves.

See more in the TATKOP series.