A bit of light-hearted language nonsense here, but apparently the following is a real sentence!
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
A bit of light-hearted language nonsense here, but apparently the following is a real sentence!
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
Mamihlapinatapai … well, I guess you already know it’s a word from the Yaghan language (Tierra del Fuego), but what does it mean?! It’s a … “look shared by two people, each wishing the other would initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”
We won’t be squeezing it into a media release any time soon, but we like it and think it deserves its place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word” and its reputation as one of the hardest words to translate.
Following on from our previous post on PR measurement, here’s a great piece from 2009 from American PR guy Don Bartholomew on five things to forget and five things to learn when measuring PR work.
It is said that Google reaches about 167 terabytes of information on the open web but there are another 91,000 terabytes sitting in the ‘deep web’ that Google, Bing, Yahoo and other mainstream search engines can’t reach. Here’s an interesting article on 10 search engines, such as Infomine, DeepWebTech and Scirus, that can search the deep web to find those hidden libraries of knowledge you never knew existed.
Facttactic’s core business is writing for other businesses. We spend a lot of time doing it — writing, that is — and a lot of time thinking about how to make it better and how to give our clients the best writing service they could get.
So … we always enjoy finding out what other accomplished writers have to say on the craft of writing. This Guardian article is a good read. It asks a bunch of established, British, fiction writers for tips on the dos and don’ts of writing.
While we don’t write fiction here at Facttactic, there’s a number of tips in the article we think are worth keeping in mind — Jeanette Winterson, for example: “Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom”, and Colm Tóibín: “Get on with it”. Consider it done!
I’ve found a pen that records and remembers what it writes and also records sounds and then links the recordings to the words that were being written at the time … when I first read about it I was blown away by the concept.
We don’t generally use this blog for product promotion, but as a writer and a regular interviewer who needs to record conversations, the Livescribe pen is one very cool piece of high-tech equipment.
But at $500 I won’t be buying one. Why? Well, when I can buy a full-spec computer for less than twice the price and a good quality digital voice recorder for well under half the price, I can’t see the value in that price point. If I could I would snap one up because it’s a neat toy, but unless the price drops a bit below its new-technology price, I’ll be sticking to my trusty blue biros and my hard-working, hard-wearing voice recorder.