hackbash

This is great; an error message from Google (in US English) telling me it couldn’t provide content in my language (UK English). I’ve whinged about regional settings before, but it turns out I’m bilingual. Who knew?

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Journochlophobia – fear of crowd-sourcing Handolio introduced me to ‘enochlophobia’ in this rather fine post about Larmer Tree on Living.

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I don’t think I’m putting it too strongly when I say that I fucking loves music. I listen to it all the time – mostly for pure enjoyment, but sometimes it goes beyond that. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s a joy. Like smells, old songs can evoke the strongest memories. I can [...]

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Marks & Spencer has a lot to answer for. I don’t mean because it contributes 400 million carrier bags to the 13 billion apparently handed out by British retailers each year, or even because of the “widespread discrimination” that Unite alleges at the store’s meat suppliers. But because of that fucking “These are not just…” [...]

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Here we go again. Flood warnings across the country as it pisses it down with rain and the tide of watery metaphors looks set to rise in the media. According to a reporter for Radio 4′s 6 o’clock news, the National Flood Forum’s helpline has already been ‘inundated’ with calls. Back on the very first [...]

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If you’d asked me a little while ago what the single most annoying thing in the world is, I might have proposed this: the moment when you’re stuck in a seemingly interminable queue for some kind of customer service representative, and a prerecorded voice interrupts the ring tone to tell you: “we apologise for the [...]

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One of the best things about English is the fact that, if you know what you’re doing, you can mess about with it. In fact, even if you don’t know what you’re doing you can often get away with it. If everybody stuck to the rules we wouldn’t have the twisted brain-wrong of a one-off [...]

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Charlie recently had a rant about newsreaders who don’t understand what it means to ‘log on’. I couldn’t agree with him more. I think the minimum requirements for logging onto something are supplying a user name and a password, and I write for a computer magazine so I should know. Still, it’s not always that [...]

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