Congradulations!

From my inbox:

Congrads on your new position as editor.

Seriously? Come on people. For clarification, this was not some casual e-mail sent to me by a friend. If it were, I would have ignored it. (After all, I don't spell check casual e-mails I send to friends. I don't always spell check my blog.) But it wasn't. It concluded the opening paragraph of a well thought out 800+ word testimonial pitch (we don't publish those anyway) sent to me by a PR representative. Sure, "conGRADulations" is cute on a graduation card ... but if you're trying to pitch a story to an editor, please use spell check. Thanks.

It might be "worth while" to learn the difference between affect and effect.

From my Inbox:

One suggestion I do have is to possibly get on a call with our president…He can talk about mold and its affect on allergies, and he can also provide solutions, with a VERY soft sell of our product (fact sheet attached). Let me know if that’s something worth while to pursue and I’d be happy to set it up for you (or the writer).

Manager, Marketing Communications

I Could Care Less

From a manuscript I'm currently editing:

I pick up a magazine, but I can’t concentrate on that either. The latest fad diet or newest winter fashions seem so inconsequential. I have a long “To Do” list, but I could care less.

And to save time, I'll just steal someone else's words:

The expression I could not care less originally meant 'it would be impossible for me to care less than I do because I do not care at all'. It was originally a British saying and came to the US in the 1950s. It is senseless to transform it into the now-common I could care less. If you could care less, that means you care at least a little. The original is quite sarcastic and the other form is clearly nonsense. The inverted form I could care less was coined in the US and is found only here, recorded in print by 1966. The question is, something caused the negative to vanish even while the original form of the expression was still very much in vogue and available for comparison - so what was it? There are other American English expressions that have a similar sarcastic inversion of an apparent sense, such as Tell me about it!, which usually means 'Don't tell me about it, because I know all about it already'. The Yiddish I should be so lucky!, in which the real sense is often 'I have no hope of being so lucky', has a similar stress pattern with the same sarcastic inversion of meaning as does I could care less. http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/g09.html

Apparently, the Brits really hate this American colloquialism:

http://spandg.blogspot.com/2007/10/my-biggest-english-peeve.html

From My Inbox ...

E-mails like these (in reply to an acceptance letter I sent for her poetry submission) totally make my day and make the occassional stress worth it.

Laura, You cannot image how your email lifted my sprits yesterday. I teach struggling high school students, and by the end of the day yesterday, I rather felt that my essence had been vacuumed out entirely. It was nice to be reminded that I am a women who thinks, feels, and writes, as well as, teaches. It gives me great joy to know that my poem will be published and read in the waiting room where whence I spent many a day....

Football on the Brain?

Every so often at work, I send out assignment letters asking doctors, nurses, and others in the oncology field to write articles for our magazine. After I make the assignments, I keep an Excel document with the authors, the article title, etc. so I can track their progress and make follow-ups if necessary.

Well, one of them called me today saying she would love to write for Coping. Her last name was Hornig, and when I looked up her name (in the middle of the phone conversation, mind you, because it is hard to keep track of everyone, and I never want to give the impression that I don't remember someone, which happens a lot, anyway, back to the point), she wasn't there.

She wasn't there because I had typed her name in as "Henig" instead of "Hornig." So not only does he frustrate me during games, but he also pops up at work. How is this possible?

Order Has Been Restored

There were tons of people at Starbucks today, and I was, once again, late for work.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone aka Starbucks

I have a really bad habit. I'm not too proud to admit it. Every morning on my way to work, I pass Starbucks, and every morning, I stop to order a latte of some sort, non-fat of course. I can't help it. It's there calling my name like a heroine addiction. Every morining, the drive-thru line is backed up into the street, blocking the entrance for those of us who want to park our cars and go inside to get our coffee, or in my case, lattes. (Here's a little secret for those of you in the drive-thru line: there are usually two registers open inside and only a couple of people in line.) So, back to my story, every day before I head in to work, I fight all the other Starbucks addicts to get my daily fix.

That is, until today. On my way to work today, I turned into Starbucks and (gasp) pulled right up to the empty drive-thru window. And you may be thinking that all the other people had simply been clued in to my little Starbucks secret, but the parking lot was empty, at 7:53 on a Monday morning. Naturally, I did what any semi-neurotic person would do: is there some holiday that I don't know about, is it really 6:53 instead of 7:53, is it Sunday instead of Monday, was there some huge natural disaster that happened and only Starbucks survived, did the Rapture happen in reverse, or maybe, just maybe, did Starbucks stop adding heroine to their espresso?