LKL’s Blog

Amazon is one of my favorite stores, online or off. I quickly became addicted to buying books from them, and I’ve since graduated to kitchen items (my second favorite thing to shop for). A week ago, they were offering $25 off an order of $125 in housewares, so I took advantage of that, along with free super saver shipping. Unfortunately, a single item was on back order, so the whole order wasn’t to be mailed for over a month.

In order to avoid having to wait so long, I decided to replace that item with another, but it turns out that isn’t possible. I deleted the old but there was no way to add the new, and since I was no longer over 125, the price went up by $25. Plus, the ship date didn’t change, even though everything in my order was in stock.

I wrote to customer service, who responded by fixing the ship date (there was some kind of glitch) and upgrading me to regular shipping. I thanked them for that, but explained that I was still disappointed that I couldn’t add an item to meet the coupon requirements. I wasn’t mad, but they reacted as if I were threatening never to shop there again. They said that since I’m such a great customer, they’d go ahead and take the 25 off anyway.

How can you not love being treated like that?

English lovers and nitpickers take note - I just discovered a great site, called The Eggcorn Database. An eggcorn is a particular type of English mistake wherein the wrong word is used in a common expression. It is usually due to ignorance of the underlying meaning and etymology, and is often the substitution of one homophone for another, such as “towing the line” (rather than “toeing the line”) or else a similar-sounding word, such as “fermenting trouble” when you really mean “fomenting trouble.” I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of mistakes, which are, I believe, cousins of the common English mistakes I so love to explain on my own site.

I saw Stomp the Yard this weekend. The dancing was great, but they did something funky with the lighting and camers during some of the more intense scenes, which made everything kind of hard to make out. I’m not sure whether it was just me, or the theater, or what, but it really detracted from the movie. I often notice a similar problem with great sweeping scenes, like at the beginning of movies when they pan over a whole city or something. I can’t believe that filmmakers wouldn’t notice such flaws, so I wonder what the problem is… does the screen have to be a particular size in order for those effects to work or something?

These two English words are very similar; keep reading for further information: Farther vs Further

So the big news in the French press is about the word bravitude used by presidential hopeful Ségolène Royal. Critics are comparing it to Bushisms like “misunderestimate,” but Ms. Royal says that it wasn’t a mistake - she coined the word because the word bravoure just wasn’t strong enough for the Chinese proverb she was translating. It’s an interesting question - what’s the difference between using a word that doesn’t exist because you don’t know any better and using one that doesn’t exist, but (maybe) should?

As part of an initiative to encourage British tourism in Paris, French gestures have been “revealed,” for what you would think was the first time ever (learn more). It seems practically every online newspaper has an article about this “guide to understanding Parisians,” and I can only laugh when I check the publication date on my photo gallery of French gestures: February 2001. Not to mention the fact that I have a lot more than 8.

My agent sent me this joke:
  A mother mouse and a baby mouse are walking along, when all of a sudden, a cat attacks them.
  The mother mouse yells, “BARK!” and the cat runs away.
“See?” says the mother mouse to her baby. “Now do you understand why it’s important to learn a foreign language?”

Now that I’ve convinced you how important foreign languages are here are some links:
  * Learn French
  * Learn Spanish
  * Learn English
  * Apprendre l’anglais
  * Aprenda inglés