John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons

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Entries Tagged as 'Life'

Translation Error

July 25th, 2010 · No Comments

The interpreter loses her cool, and we know just how she feels.

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Tags: Life

Grammar Nazis

July 21st, 2010 · No Comments

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

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Tags: Life

Post

June 22nd, 2009 · 1 Comment

The post is another country. They do things differently there.

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Tags: Life

Ex-Pet Lion Meets Former Owners

June 22nd, 2009 · No Comments

This video is unclassified because I have no reason at all for posting it, except – why not? Found on Futility Closet, the site of my semi-namesake, Greg Ross. A once-cuddly lion cub had outgrown his bourgeois pet status and been released into the semi-wilderness of a wildlife reserve to save his owners the trouble […]

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Tags: Life

Street Sign Silliness

February 2nd, 2009 · No Comments

Punctuation purists led by John Richards, founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, are up in arms over Birmingham City Council’s decision to omit apostrophes from street signs. Reactions have run from the usual indignation to outright horror. Apostrophe Abuse ironizes about it cleverly, calling Birmingham “the city where apostrophes arent welcome,” while Apostrophe Catastrophes goes […]

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Tags: Language · Life

The End of Civilization As We Know It

February 1st, 2009 · 2 Comments

Over at You Don’t Say,* the blog of Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre, there has been a discussion going on about Wikipedia. I must point out that the Wikipediaphobes have not, quite, said that the online encyclopaedia will bring about the End of Civilization etc. as the title of this post would suggest. On […]

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Tags: Language · Life

More Nipples

January 30th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Even with the abundance of flesh available on the Internet nowadays, the word “nipple” elicits schoolboy humour, and my Guitar Nipple thread (Is Guitar Nipple a Hoax?) caused more hilarity than interest on the Delcamp forum. Some reactions: – “Watching topic to keep abreast of developments” – “I’ll ask my teat-cher” – “I think you’ve […]

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Tags: Guitar · Life

Is Guitar Nipple a Hoax, too?

January 29th, 2009 · No Comments

I posted the following on Jean-François Delcamp’s classical guitar forum, but just in case any guitarists in the know run across this post first: There’s a thread going about the recently disclosed cello scrotum hoax which I don’t want to hijack. But the doubt is raised. by none other than Baroness Murphy herself, who must […]

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Tags: Guitar · Life

Hi-Tech Highwaymen

January 27th, 2009 · No Comments

I’ve always been uneasy with tolls. I mean, a toll entails stopping someone at point C who has left A and needs to get to B and charging them money before allowing them to continue. So what is the difference between that and pointing a blunderbuss at your victim and saying “Stand and deliver?” Unfortunately, […]

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Tags: Life

Opposing Orwell

January 12th, 2009 · 1 Comment

David Beaver has a post on Language Log about George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. I find much to disagree with in Mr Beaver’s post, and Language Log’s Comments Policy says “blog comments should be short. If you have a lot to say, post it on your own blog and link to […]

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Tags: Language · Life · Writing