Author Archives: Robert Basil

Ginormous

Bryan Garner, lawyer and English language usage scholar, on one of my favourite words: A portmanteau is a type of luggage with two separate sections. A portmanteau word is formed by combining the sounds and meanings of two different words. Linguists … Continue reading

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Independent Creativity: Making Yourself Successful

The wonderful Molly Crabapple explains what she has learned, in fifteen paragraphs. Here are a half dozen: Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a … Continue reading

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#MRKT3311

Students in my “Marketing in the Digital World” class at KPU are educating one another and myself via numerous social-media platforms. Here’s the class twitter feed for your edification, too. It’s very lively, intelligent, and in tune. Photo by Miles Basil

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“Bucks for Clicks” journalism

I like Virginia Postrel‘s take on the recent controversy over at Forbes.com. A popular author, Bill Frezza, published a controversial column on that website – advising university fraternities to beware of female students who show up at their parties drunk … Continue reading

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Accent-removal class

Notes Mark Liberman at Language Log: “In a better world, the speakers of the ‘standard’ variety would take a prejudice elimination class instead.”

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The Work of Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple‘s only peer as an illustrator / artist / journalist is the great Joe Sacco. The tone of their work is very different, though. Whereas Sacco’s reporting is dispassionate and ironic, Crabapple’s is emotional and argumentative. Sacco’s art – black … Continue reading

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“No Fireworks on the Fourth of July?”

Virginia Postrel‘s book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, published in 1999, has long been one of my favourite libertarian works: smart, funny, level-headed (that is, not dogmatic). Her more recent work has focused on … Continue reading

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Where are the women in the high-tech industry?

Vivek Wadhwa crowd-funded the publication of his new book, Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology (cowritten with Farai Chedey). He also “crowd-created” it with the help of more than 500 women who contributed research and writing. In this podcast with … Continue reading

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Acting Together

For its first two and a half years I was the “knowledge dissemination adviser” for the Acting Together research project. Based at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and funded by a federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research grant, the project’s goal was … Continue reading

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Really good, free online technical communications text

A couple years ago Dave McMurrey’s online technical-writing textbook vanished from the Internet – not sure why. But *it is back*, and I suggest you bookmark it. A wonderful resource.

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