About

I'm Mike Pope. I live in the Seattle area. I've been a technical writer and editor for over 35 years. I'm interested in software, language, music, movies, books, motorcycles, travel, and ... well, lots of stuff.

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I know plenty of copy editors that are fully aware of their role as editors of one text at a time and who don't claim to be guardians of language. They are not peevologists. They don't feel attacked by mistakes and they don't hope to change all language into one register. They respect decorum and they trust that most users do so as well as they do.

The peevologists are looking to change something that will not change. They seek a power that is not theirs and they express frustration based on a sense of entitlement that is not only arrogant but irrational. They hope to change the rotation of the earth and live with constant frustration, throwing stones at every sunrise and sunset.


Michael Covarrubias (wishydig)



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Blog Statistics

Dates
First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 9/4/2024

Totals
Posts - 2655
Comments - 2677
Hits - 2,722,688

Averages
Entries/day - 0.34
Comments/entry - 1.01
Hits/day - 346

Updated every 30 minutes. Last: 1:29 PM Pacific


  08:55 AM

I'm waiting for A Very Important Delivery today from UPS. Knowing the kind of pace that those guys work at, tho, I'm afraid to even, like, go tinkle lest I miss the harking of the doorbell.

Brain quiz. How much does your brain know about your brain? Haha. I got 9/10, meaning that I was not using 10% of my brain. Haha again.

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners. Always amusing. Samples:

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.

100 Skills Every Man Should Know: 2008's Ultimate DIY List. There are a number of things wrong with the premise of this article. Among them is that it's hard to sort out the practical from the macho. Note that there are a couple of items that were probably not on the 1962 version of this list. [via Michael B]

Take our survey. A Language Log contributor posts a survey about surveys. Most representative question:

Do you think surveys asking for people's opinions about the way things are, rather than verifiable things they have done, are an even more extreme form of stupidity, resulting in nonsense like "43% of employees believe managers may be snooping on them" being passed off as news or even social science?

__ strongly agree
__ sort of agree
__ utterly undecided
__ hardly care
__ sort of disagree
__ strongly disagree

You get the idea.[1]


[1] Only distantly related, but amusing, Jeff Atwood notes the following on Twitter: "great, so the 'poll' on whether 'polls' should be allowed on Stack Overflow is split 50/50"

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