Some quickie Blurbs from the yaBut guys:
Brain-Dead Nomenclature: The press, the ABA Journal, along with many bloggers, have adopted the in-apt and inept terminology Brain Fingerprinting for the process of “reading the brain’s involuntary electrical activity in response to a subject being shown certain images relating to a crime.” Even if Dr. Larry Farwell, chief scientist and founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, chose a catchy rather than accurate phrase to help sell his device, there’s no excuse for lawyers or journalists to aid and abet his linguistic crime.
“brain” After thinking about it for maybe a minute, skepticalEsq suggests that this appears to be image recognition testing. Wouldn’t that, or similar, terminology communicate the concept to the public more precisely, without being too arcane for acceptance in everyday language? Earlier this year, ethicalEsq complained about calling DNA identification procedures “DNA fingerprints”. The term “brain fingerprinting” seems to be even less helpful and more confusing.
Corp Law Blog‘s Mike O’Sullivan didn’t even mention this website [or its predecessor], when whining about his weblog’s comparative treatment at the hands of Evan Schaeffer. Mike, “Better Abused Than Ignored” is the motto around here (but, don’t try this at home).
Scheherazade is thinking about setting up a (tentative) imaginary lunch with Your Humble Editor. Cool. And, not even fattening.
Evan Schaeffer included ethicalEsq in his list of “useful” weblogs. See Blogging Evangelist. [Evan didn’t even complain about the frequent name changes at this website URL.]
The Federal Trade Commission is finally suing a “debt negotiation” firm for its unfair, deceptive and harmful financial “services.” The firm is also the first respondent sued for violation of the federal Do Not Call Registry. [We won’t even point out that we wrote to the Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection at the end of 1997, complaining about a virtually identical debt reduction-negotiation scam. The FTC took no action against the offending “law firm,” which subsequently took millions of dollars from perhaps 20,000 financially distressed customers, while ruining their credit.]
The Grammar Goddess Diane Sandford has recently covered several topics of importance to lovers of good language and diction. For example:
“If you want a simple rule guaranteed to improve your writing, try this: Avoid the words very, really, truly, quite, and thing. Rarely do these words contribute to a sentence.”
“Skill in writing consists of having at command an array of synonyms, together with a sense of their fitness.”
She also offers a very good lesson in Comma Sense.