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‘gripes’ Category

  1. Say What?!

    December 6, 2011 by asteffann

    A friend of mine from my advertising days posted this link today, and I couldn’t agree with it more.

    Whether it’s in business or in academics, many of us are feeling overloaded with jargon. Writing is needlessly complicated. Meaning is lost. Sincerity is compromised.

    I really appreciate what Dan Palotta has to say in this post called I Don’t Understand What Anyone is Saying Anymore and I challenge myself and all of my students to be less concerned with sounding “smart” and become more concerned with clarity!


  2. Literally…

    October 13, 2011 by asteffann

    In class last week, I couldn’t resist airing my complaints about how people are always using the word “literally” to describe things that are not really literal.

    For example:

    “My headache was so bad that my head was literally exploding.”

    Um. NO. Your head may have been figuratively exploding…or you wouldn’t be telling me this story.  I felt kind of bad sharing this diatribe with my students. I knew one of two things must be true: either they were thinking what a bore I am for being so picky (and that I should get a hobby) or they had just acquired a new pet peeve that would dog them for life.

    Not literally.

    Anyway, today I saw an article on CNN and was about to cry foul.  MISUSED!

    Then I read the article and saw that I had (figuratively) jumped the gun.

    Your dead iPhone is a goldmine – literally

    (weird lack of capitalization in title is theirs, not mine)

    I was expecting a story about how people could mine my information in my dead iPhone to steal my money, which does not make an iPhone a literal goldmine.  However, it appears that a dead iPhone actually contains precious metals. Actually!

    Well, I don’t really have an iPhone, but now I’m thinking about how much I should really let my toddler play Angry Birds on my precious Droid.