Saturday, July 25, 2020

Pseudo-English terms in Italian

Vera Gheno, Zanichelli’s “Linguista Errante” has recently published an instructive article (in Italian) on “pseudoanglicismi” -- those words and terms in Italian that look like English words, but whose meaning is quite different from their meaning in English.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

A special place is reserved in purgatory...

... for all clients who answer questions which require a choice between two alternatives with a simple “yes”

For example:

Question: In the sentence “Blah blah blah XYZ blah blah”, does “XYZ” mean “ABC” or does it mean “DEF”, instead?
Answer: Yes

The only thing answers such as this tell me is that the client hasn’t bothered reading the question properly.

A correct answer to the above could be “ABC”, it could be “DEF”, or it could even be “Neither: it means GHI”.

But “yes” is never a correct answer to a question that asks which of two proposed alternatives is correct.

Monday, July 20, 2020

Everything - A great freeware tool to find files on your computer

I've been using Everything as a search tool for finding files on my computer and home network for several years, and it is one of the few tools I really find I could not do without. 

Much better than Windows' own tools for searching files you know you have but that you can't quite remember where you put them... or even what the exact name of the file was.