Thing is, five of these eleven are wrong.

i.e. does not “specify and limit”, nor is it exchangeable with namely.  Both i.e. and e.g. are used to give example lists; the people that author are picking at stand a small chance of being correct.

e.g., (“exempli gratia” -> ‘gratuitous example’) is used for giving case examples (e.g. this example right here).

i.e. (“id est” -> ‘it is’) is used when you can give every possible example: you are concretely defining the list.  For instance, I could talk about the primary colors (i.e. red, yellow and blue), but I could not talk about the list of all colors (e.g. red, orange, chartreuse, gray, et cetera.)

The next is subtle.

With regards to “none is”, that depends on whether you’re dealing with a group singular or a group plural.  Indeed, is/are are in context how one deals with resolving whether a group or singular plural is in use; to suggest that either are always concretely correct and the other never is fundamentally wrong-headed.

Group singulars and group plurals are differentiated along lines of when you’re talking about the group as a whole, or when you’re talking about a set of individual members.  For example, when you talk about the many religions found in Bharat’s individuals, you might say “the people of India are varied in belief”.

The problem with “none” is that people expect it always to refer to single individuals within a group.  So by the example on that page, “Though many religions are found in India, none of its people is Rastafarian”, though agonizing to the ear, is technically correct.

However, there are ways to make none apply to groups despite context – for example, when categorizing.  Going on the observation that there are a bunch of variants of Christianity, such as Protestantism or Catholocism, and pretending those people aren’t in India (I know, they are, I just need an example), “Though many religions are found in India, none of its religions are Christian in nature” would apply, because its context refers to groups.

Prevarication Junction is particularly annoying: sometimes it’s appropriate to say what you think rather than what you know, and their third example is a concrete knowledge.  Indeed, stating the first two as concrete knowledge would be lying: one cannot know that they will be good for a company without the ability to see the future, because they might turn out to not fit in well in the corporate culture, or might not have the right skillset, or might not be able to focus on the job; similar remarks apply to the product for the company.

It is common for people to claim that speaking in absolutes is better language.  This is complete bullshit.  It’s just a way for people to sound more confident than they really are, to make themselves look good at the expense of being precise or honest.  This only works on stupid people, and backfires on smart people.  Do not claim to know things when you actually only suspect them (one doesn’t know it, one suspects it, and when it turns out to be wrong, one looks like a horse’s ass.)

Under no circumstances state things that are suspected as if they are fact.  This advice is terrible.

The bit about preferring “et al” to “et cetera” is absolute nonsense.  Use et cetera when applying to lists.  Et al only gets used in lists of people.

Of course, the more germane point here is that both etc. and et al are generally unnecessary and considered bad form; use either only when necessary to maintain understandable brevity.

The bit about less versus fewer is generally correct in spirit.  However, it has nothing to do with finite-ness.  This is actually about group plurals versus group singulars (and basic singulars) again: fewer dollars make for less money.  If half of India were to move to Russia one day, then there would be fewer people there, and less population.

This is understandable, of course: three of these are obscure parts of English, and everyone on the web thinks they’re qualified to teach English despite having no formal training theretowards.

Ambrose Bierce, however, is to be trusted.  If Ambrose Bierce and another source disagree, and neither source explicitly distances itself from differing sets of rules (eg American/British English, obsolete/modern usage, whatever), then nine times in ten Bierce will be correct.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12474/12474-h/12474-h.htm

Good sir, please do us the favor of not writing any more articles about what’s correct in English until you’ve taken some courses that would allow you to teach English in a school system somewhere.  The average sixth grader wouldn’t make most of these mistakes.

Guy Kawasaki’s books actually contain several counter-examples to these wisdumbs.  I hope he’ll read more carefully before recommending in the future.

In brief, the context is that of discussing a radical shift in the health of the aging; the supposition is that, since the advent of antibiotics, we are as a people becoming bigger and badasser and far less susceptible to the ravages of elderlyhood.  (Shut up, it’s a word now.)  In that respect, Robert Fogel correctly points out that we are experiencing a kind of change at the species level that we’ve never had before (which is debatable, considering the transition of our being small-ish frigovores to our being omnivores, which many biologists credit our having enough spare energy to develop big brains, but that’s moot here.)  The question of the day seems to be that of our transition from a group who lived their lives to a group who lives their lives carefully, and thus reaps significant rewards in terms of survival and slower senescent deterioration.

Unfortunately, Robbie’s travel into the land of personal hygiene products begins when he refers to this shift as an evolutionary shift.  It’s not a slip of the tongue: he actually seems to believe that this is a function of natural selection (since species never evolve, ever, dipstick, they are selected for.)  To quote the article’s framed quote (I adore nested nesting,) ” Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.” “  And, curmudgeon that I am, I’m saying bah.  I reserve the right for future humbuggery.

Let’s be clear: this is not evolution in any way.  If a meteor hits the planet and we lose our infrastructure, if our antibiotics and good food structure goes away, we go back to being frail.  Natural selection is (sort of) permanent.  It takes new selection to get rid of what was already done.  If you have a collection of ten cars, and you treat five of them well and five badly – the first five you keep up on their scheduled maintenance, whereas the second five you never change the oil and fluids – then the first five will be performing far better in their 100,000 mile “old age” than the second five.

Have those cars evolved?  Dork.  We’re just taking better care of ourselves, and are as a result less damaged.  That’s not evolution.  That’s a change in lifestyle.  The Japanese are a foot taller than two generations ago because they’re eating more protien (yay mcdonalds.)  Have they evolved?  The Northern Africans are having circulatory problems far less often than previously because of the efforts of various health organizations to eliminate certain classes of bloodworm.  Have they evolved?  People in the American Midwest have dropping rates of heart disease and colon cancer because of a slow shift away from saturated fats (which needs to happen more;) have they evolved?

Before I even get into that that’s not what evolution is, you big target of a Summer’s Eve commercial, let’s review: if something is kept well, and therefore is less statistically likely to fail after a given timespan, IT HAS NOT EVOLVED.  It’s simply being better taken care of.  Not all progress is in terms of the fundamental design of the species.  Believe it or not, there are other things governing us than selection and taxes.

Maybe one of these days I’ll explain what the word evolution actually means.  What people usually use it to mean is actually called “natural selection,” and the verb-ish form is “[to be] selected for.”  Weather systems and fractals evolve.  Life forms don’t.  Evolution is the progression of a pattern.  Someone needs to read some goddamned Darwin.

It’s not often one gets to call a Nobel Laureate a dumbass, but today is that day.  Luckily, I have friends and family at his university; maybe I’ll be a big asshat and tell them to get him to read this.

But prolly not.   I don’t need for a Nobel Laureate to come to my blog and make me look dumber than I already do.

Whee.

So, I played some word games recently – Boggle and Scrabble among them – whose scoring mechanic hinges largely on board placement and on the rarity of the letters in use (the canonical “Q and Z are ten, J and X are eight” rule.) I decided that I didn’t like the distribution in use, and that it was time to generate a new one.

First step was to decide on a distribution. Scrabble’s a bunch of fun, but in all honesty it touches on a very small part of our vocabularies. Even when you’re playing against very skilled players, certain words just come out more often than others. As I’m sure to eventually start ranting about in another blog entry, I’m into the idea of educational gaming; Scrabble may have originally been invented to fill the inventor’s lack of a job time during the Great Depression, but a huge percentage of its sales these days are in a pseudoeducational capacity by parents hoping to develop their children’s lexical repertoire in a way that’s at least entertaining.

Alfred Mosher Butts, the game’s inventor, did a great job given the tools available at the time. He went as far as to histogram several major newspapers of the time for letter frequency, something which must have been blindingly boring and error prone. Possibly because his scoring and rules were subject to a decade of tinkering before the game finally took off, the rules he ended up writing are in fact quite nicely polished; the game distinguishes itself with a large number of attempted variants and an extremely small number of even moderately successful variants, which gets into another topic I’m sure to blog about sooner or later – namely how to determine when your ruleset is stable via a shaky metaphor regarding minima, maxima, local minima and fitness evaluation.

Anyhoo, Butts did a good job with the tools available to him, but it’s been almost 80 years, and I have better tools than he did. One of the best of those tools is the ability to look back on 80 years of reaction to his game, whereas he had no reflection on anything closer than a crossword puzzle. Given that there’s no competition nor any tendency to intentionally blunt the board to prevent opponent access to powerful squares, the two games aren’t similar enough that one might learn significantly from the other.

What have we learned from Scrabble, Boggle, Upwords and the ilk? What needs to change? What needs to stay? Given that this is now being considered for a videogame, what things can I do that they didn’t have the ability to do? Asploding tiles? Alternate physics? Gold, shiny shiny gold?

One particular game I’ve played a lot recently, and rather enjoyed but thought more could be done with, was Bookworm. Bookworm is basically Boggle, but with mechanics added to prevent stagnation – for example, when you use letters, they’re destroyed, allowing new letters to fall in from the top. Also, because four surfaces are too few and because people get into arguments about diagonals, Bookworm uses a hexagonal board (rendered with squares, but that’s relatively unimportant.) Still, it’s not aimed at my demographic; turns are infinite time, which is great for part of the casual gamer crowd, but combined with how long it takes for the obstacles to start showing up and how suddenly and annoyingly diffcult they become, I’m convinced that this is a very good game mechanic suffering a near-disasterously flawed implementation.

Not that I have a competitor just yet. But still. More to come. I’ve got something I think will be pretty neat underway; I’ve been playing Sid Sackson’s BuyWord, and mulling over Scorched Earth style markets. There’s something maybe new on the horizon.