know/your/slashes

a)    ⁄            b)  /          c)  \

get grammar tips via twitter

if you like little grammar tidbits, @thatwhichmatter may be for you. at 140 characters or less, some posts are a little difficult to decipher, but the advice is sound. keep in mind you do not need to have a twitter account to consume these tweets; RSS works too.

sample tweet:

HISTORIC/HISTORICAL? Historic: historically significant. Historical: occurred in history (sig. or not). Most prefer "a", as in "a historic."

@thatwhichmatter [via lifehacker]

famous as a moon-jumping cow

i like to think i have a good handle what what is common knowledge, but in the off chance that this is new information to someone:

no one expects the gnaborretni

‽=?!
another underused punctuation mark, the interrobang is an exclamation point (sometimes referred to as a "bang") overlayed with a question mark (a.k.a. an interrogative point) and it is used in the exact way these two symbols act when they are together: excited inquisition or disbelief (symbolic portmanteauism?).

the best music from the 80's, 90's, and... uh... TODAY!

now that the last year of the decade is winding down, we are finally coming to a consensus on the ubiquitous question (why was this not solved in 1901?):

"what do we call this decade?"

apartheid

i have seen this word an abnormal number of times in the past month and i had no idea what it was or even how to pronounce it. after learning its meaning, i now understand much better why i have been seeing it so frequently, as it is the allegorical basis of the movie district 9.

etaoin shrdlu

for anyone raised on wheel of fortune, you may or may have not come to the same conclusion that i did. i wondered "why do they give the contestant R,S,T,L,N, and E for the final puzzle? what is special about these letters?" combining my young knowledge that these were all worth one point in scrabble, i figured that they gave you these letters because they were all common letters, and i further assumed these must be the most common letters (excepting the vowels, which i knew were mostly more common but would make WoF puzzles too easy)