Lordosis, spondylosis, disc-osteophyte, foraminal stenosis, thecal sac, ligamentum flavum hypertrophy, ossified posterior ligamentum — trying to make sense of a medical analysis like this in one sitting transfers pain from my neck to my head (which solves part of my problem, at least). While Google is handy, someone needs to come up with a comprehensive Medical Jargon to Plain English wiktionary.

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

If you enjoyed this hilarious (if slightly cerebral) piece, you might also like William Safire‘s slightly more bombastic Rules for Writers.

You get this significant reverse-spoiler effect… It’s sort of as if knowing things puts you in a position that gives you certain advantages to understand the plot.

›› Why don’t we just read stories from back to front

From How to Speak and Write Correctly, by Joseph Devlin.

From the Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Also available as a paperback.

What an excellent exercise to connect your ears to your eyes and then to your hands – the Visual Thinking School, run by the communications consultancy XPLANE.

Someone seems to have pressed the button marked ‘Rain’. At night.

→ A collection of quips by former BBC weatherman Rob McElwee

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

›› Stephen King

An excellent and extensive research post titled ‘Origins of ABC’ from John Boardley at I love Typography (ILT). A marvellous piece of work and a fascinating read, too!

• Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
• Google Dictionary
• MSN Encarta World English Dictionary
• Farlex Free Dictionary
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
• Macmillan English Dictionaries
• Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
• Oxford Dictionaries Online
• Wiktionary

Get more English dictionaries here and here. And if you’re into brushing up your Singlish, don’t forget the Coxford Singlish Dictionary.

Also, Dictionary.com was not included or linked because the overwhelming number of banner ads on their site slows down search results significantly and makes me generally dislike/distrust them.

Great idea by geek comedian, Tom Scott.

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

›› Kurt Vonnegut

Stuff like Fake AP Stylebook is about the only times I hang out on Twitter. (Also see Shit My Dad Says and the cruel but now inactive Stevie Wonder Tweets.)

[Via Wired]

So Sarah Palin resigned officially a couple of days ago. Vanity Fair took her farewell speech and got their editors to class it up. The cruft and errors (like getting a past President wrong) are just shockingly laughable.