Archive for August, 2007
Nouns seem like a basic concept in English, but like everything else in English grammar, they seem to confuse the heck out of most people.
I broach this topic after watching a segment of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? (sadly, few adults are), which featured a question asking the contestant to name the three proper nouns in a sample sentence.
Ms. Contestant, a college graduate with a 3.5 GPA, stumbled all over the place before finally agreeing with a fifth grader and getting it right. (She was ready to pronounce two of the proper nouns to be pronouns; the fifth grader knew better and was smarter.)
Okay, what is a noun?
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No really, but the headline sounded good.
What actually happened was that a Dutch prince in line for the throne got caught in a scandal and had to renounce his succession to the throne.
Then, seduced by the all-evil Wikipedia, he went to the site to silence the scandal–and got caught.
Naughty, naughty prince!
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I read recently that three-quarters of U.S. small businesses don’t have any employees or offices because they are one-person operations run from a desktop computer, or more recently, from a laptop on the go.
A term has been coiled for these laptop businesspeople: Bedouins.
Now, traditionally a Bedouin is a nomad in the desert, so does that image fit?
As sort of a business Bedouin myself, I must say that the analogy is apt. I often feel as if I’m lost in a desert.
Sometimes having a bad boss to yell at you is more reassuring of your existence than sitting in front of your laptop and doing what you want to do.
Nah, not really.
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I forget whose credit card ad advises “don’t leave home without it,” but when it comes to Wikipedia, my advice is to leave everywhere without it. It’s just highly unreliable as a source of information.
Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone who registers with the site, its pages are constantly being “updated” by those with a stake in the information, whether a person or a business, and many of these edits are far from objective or even truthful.
Case in point: A company called FAST recently suffered a huge share drop, but when Wikipedia reported this, someone (guess who?) kept deleting the information.
Now an editor at Wikipedia has posted a notice on the page for the party responsible to cease deleting the information.
Read the whole page. It’s fascinating, and it will show you why I say, “Never trust Wikipedia.”
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I’m neither famous or successful, and thus Wikipedia–the open-source encyclopedia for the Web 2.0 generation–would never feature me in its pages. So unless fame or fortune descend upon me, I’m safe from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that can be an article in the pages of Wikipedia.
The problem with [tag]Wikipeda[/tag], and the root of its success as well, is that it is a wiki at heart, an open source that anyone can edit by simply registering.
Is that such a bad thing, you ask?
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