When Words Go Wrong

Being fortunate enough (or unfortunate, depending) to be working for very articulate people, one of whom drops words like “puerile” and “truculent” on a regular basis, I always have to be on my toes when it comes to the written and spoken word. Precision is key, and so it is that I find advice like the one below (lifted from a Ragan Communications newsletter) a useful reminder.

When Words Go Wrong
Desktop Edit Shop in Ragan’s Grapevine

Proofreading – R.I.P.

One might think that ye olde major newspapers would have a commitment to proofreading. One might be wrong. In the past year, we spotted a New York Times Magazine article in which the author discussed the need for the United States to defend itself against “rouge states”—a typo, but one more demonstration that running the spellchecker is no substitute for proofreading……

Caution

• “Credible” means plausible, capable of being believed. “Credulous” means gullible, overly inclined to believe. It’s incredible (not incredulous) how often they’re confused.

• It’s also common for people to use “percent” when they really mean “percentage points.” For example, if a candidate received 50 percent of the vote in 1996 and 70 percent in 2000, the portion of the electorate casting votes for this person rose 20 percentage points—which is an increase of 40 percent.

• We’ve noticed that more business writers enjoy tossing in the academic abbreviations “i.e.” and “e.g.” We’ve also noticed how often they seem to get them wrong. “I.e.” means “that is” (from Latin id est) and connotes a clarification or expansion of something just said. “E.g.” means “for example” (Latin exempli gratia) and is followed by—you guessed it—one or more examples.

Read the article for more language bloopers. Ragan Communications, by the way, has a slew of good, free e-newsletters on communications. I also enjoy one of their authors’ blogs, Corporate Hallucinations, which gives an irreverent (and refreshing) take on PR and communications.

Filed under: Collectibles, Writing

Tech Interlude: My Ideal Smartphone?

I believe I may have found the smartphone I’ve been looking for.

The Samsung i320N has a QWERTY thumb keyboard, Office file viewer, web browser, in a slim sleek casing.  Running on Windows Mobile 5.0, it will give me a phone-calendar-(ebook) reader-audio player-internet browser-push E-mail device, without needing too much space in my handbag. It looks much better than the Motorola Q and the Treo. I only wish it was wifi-enabled and had 3G connectivity but – you can’t have everything if your budget is limited, I suppose.

Read reviews here and here.

Filed under: At the Stores, Personal Note, Tech, Work & Productivity

The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died: my father died a few days short of his eighty fifth birthday and my mother a month short of her ninty-first, both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured….Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxyms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

This is the first book I’ve read that deals exclusively with grief. Writer Joan Didion loses her husband of forty years and nine months after his death, proceeds to write about his death, and her loss, in this book.

It is a very detailed account, the matter of fact narrative painting in deft strokes the emotions seething underneath. Ms Didion is very thorough – painfully so, at times – and dissects the events and emotions following her husband’s death mercilessly. At times you feel that she is gritting her teeth as she writes, determined to lay bare the bones and gristles of her pain. Facts are given – dates, times, places, names – and from one fact to another, there is a trail of emotions, all couched in language so precise and direct, they pierce through your armour at unexpected moments.

Filed under: Books, Reads

A Musing: Festivities, Holidays & Photographs

I have been braving the crowds at shopping malls for the past two weekends, including for the past three days straight, and all I can say is, thank goodness the celebrations are only once a year! I have worn my sandals out trooping all over the floors of: KLCC, Subang Parade, Mid-Valley Megamall, PKNS (the best place for kids’ baju Melayus) and the new SACC Mall at Shah Alam, and the purse gets sadly depleted each visit.

We are not even having people over this Eid, as we shall be with my in-laws up north, but as usual, I get stricken by last minute guilt that I haven’t given the house due attention and get caught up in a panic over cushion covers and placemats. We just bought lighbulbs to replace the ones that have burnt out at home and it was a shock to realise we need more than twenty. How come we never noticed the dim areas of the house?

Filed under: At the Stores, Malaysiana, Personal Note, Speculations

50 Posts to Independence

Sharon tagged me, and I’m the fifth to dedicate a post to the nation’s fiftieth Merdeka next year as part of Nizam Bashir’s Independence project.

When I was a child, my cousins and I played games where we could choose our own nationalities. In that game, none of us wanted to be Malaysian – we would all scramble for being American, British, and even French or German.

Something changed as I grew older.

Pride of nationhood seeped in, but it wasn’t due to the Negaraku that we had to sing every Monday at assembly, nor the Rukunegara we had to memorise for exams, nor the stuffy history lessons we had in which the struggle for our Independence was reduced to dates and names and dry narrative. It had a lot to do with the country’s progress and the realisation that – yes, Malaysians can venture abroad and hold their own against citizens from older, more developed countries. By the time I was in my teens, being Malaysian was pretty cool.

But Malaysia – and being Malaysian – is full of contradictions, and a lot of these contradictions have to do with the way the country treats its women, in particular, its Muslim women.

There are more Eves in lofty positions in government and corporate sectors, but even with these achievements and with the capabilities wielded by females, there are Ministers who caution Malaysian women against even aspiring to be the Prime Minister of Malaysia.

Against a policy backdrop that encourages female participation in the economy and the country, the higher number of female graduates in institutions of higher learning makes everyone focus on the future “problem” of getting these highly educated women partnered and married, instead of focusing on the lack of motivation (and academic achievement) among male youth.

With a Ministry set up dedicated to Women and Family and, by extension, a realisation of the importance of the family unit to a country’s social health, there is still tacit support and permission for polygamy without enforcement of the Quranic conditions of a polygamous marriage. A seminar that encourages monogamy, that highlights potential problems of polygamy, gets denounced by religious officials as being blasphemous. My nine year old son has been taught in school by his Ustaz that a Muslim man has the right to take up to four wives, without being told of the implications of this, or why it was allowed in the first place.

Women make up 50% of the country and have equal rights, yada-yada, and yet it takes a Muslim man only a few keystrokes on his mobile phone to divorce his wife, while a woman may need up to seven years to be properly divorced from her husband, should the husband refuse to grant her divorce. In the meantime, he can remarry and rebuild another family, while she has to wait until the divorce is legally settled.

So, while I am happy with being a Malaysian woman (and indeed, I appreciate that as a Muslim female, I am much better off in this country than in others), the disparity between policy statement and practice, the chasm between national ideals and public perception, the lack of justice where family law is concerned, make me want to shake the country by its collar and shout at it to – for goodness’ sakes – take action! make changes! educate! legislate! enforce! so that the problems of a significant portion of this country are no longer sidestepped and ignored.

There is no country in the world without knots and frays, and Malaysia without question has kinks to work out. But it remains, still, very much a home, my home.

Happy 50th Birthday, Malaysia. You inspire love even as you exasperate.

Next honours go to Ted, because I’m curious.

Filed under: Malaysiana, Women

Quickie: Analyse Your Handwriting

From Notebookism, I stumbled across Tul’s graphology analysis tool.

The interface is slick and all you have to do is to write a sentence (on paper) and answer multiple choice questions on your writing. It’s not the first or the freshest but the good Doctor delivering your analysis via online video makes the short test worthwhile!

Filed under: Collectibles, Tech

Getting the Hots for Planning

My MBA classes restarted today (with a funny, gung-ho strategy lesson) and in preparation of the hectic hours of MBA classes that will be crammed into my weekends, I spent the better part of an hour last night scouring the internet for tips, ideas, tricks and tools to hammer in what I need to do, what I want to do, and what I can’t get by without (chief among these is sleep) into the twenty four daily hours that God has granted.

I am on my second round of reading GTD, and working up the courage and discipline to tackle all my to-dos, project plans, and paper piles, and reduce everything to a simple, effective planning system.

I am doing all this because I have a vision. The vision of serene, blissful productivity as I efficiently move from activity to activity throughout the day, check off a long list of to-dos, complete tasks well ahead of deadlines, achieve my life goals, and still have time at the end of the day for my kids, my husband, gym, reading, writing, and relaxation.

No, you may not tell me I am delusional.

To achieve SuperWoman status, of course, I need a good planning system.

Filed under: Work & Productivity