by Kevin Burton All the cool band names are taken. Trust me. Record label names too. When last we gathered, I spun a fictional account based ever so loosely goosely on a true story. It was about a band called the Palindromes that made it big in Bermuda. The true part of …
Category Archives: language
Hey Marketers, Watch Your Language
by Kevin Burton The good people at http://www.thoughtco.com have poked into some language-barrier marketing stories and discovered some of them are simply not true. The first one burst my bubble. I heard somewhere that Chevrolet had to stop selling Nova cars in Mexico because “no va” in Spanish means, “it doesn’t go.” …
These Jokes May Drive You To Drink
by Kevin Burton Here’s a tip for you discerning eligible bachelors out there, one you may not have picked up on: Women dig grammar. In the 70s I would have said “chicks dig grammar,” but you never know when somebody, some female somebody, will stumble upon Page 7 for the first time. …
Wobble Talk And Fighting Words In English
by Kevin Burton Here’s one subject that never came up when I was teaching English in Mexico – thank God! In English, when you see the vowel combination “ae” how do you pronounce it? This was brought to my attention on an otherwise glorious Saturday morning by our friends at the Merriam-Webster …
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Looking For A Spark In A Springsteen Song
by Kevin Burton My favorite Bruce Springsteen song was born of irritation and is marinated in frustration. I seem to have slipped into it comfortably, as one might slip into a t-shirt and jeans. Here is how the song came to be, according to SongFacts: “Springsteen wrote it after his manager, …
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Love Is Growing New And She’s Still The One
by Kevin Burton Found a lyric last week that is so cool, I want to use it to tell my happy Valentine’s Day story. This is what happens when my usual Tuneful Tuesday post coincides with Valentine’s Day. The song “Still The One” went to number five for Orleans in 1976. It’s …
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Hey, Shouldn’t We Say Heels Over Head?
by Kevin Burton Let’s face it, love isn’t usually something you can analyze scientifically. Some of our words and phrases of love don’t make sense either. In honor of Valentine’s Day and with the help of Merriam-Webster dictionary, we looked yesterday, at where our love and romance words came from. We continue today …
Words Of Love For Valentine’s Day
by Kevin Burton My love of words brings us to words of love today, courtesy Merriam-Webster dictionary. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, words and phrases about romantic relationships. Once we get over being lovestruck and tongue-tied, here’s why we say it the way we say it: Goo-goo Eyes “The term ‘goo-goo eyes’ …
Curiosity, Kevspeak And What To Call A Street
by Kevin Burton I am a former fulltime newspaper reporter, but maybe my wife Jeannette would have been better than I was. Maybe much better. She stuns me with the questions she asks sometimes. She’s just so curious. Me? I am so not curious, I’ve had to come up with a euphemism …
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What Does It Take To Be A Screenwriter?
by Kevin Burton Writer Lily Cooper, on the Grand Canyon University website, lists seven traits one needs to be a screenwriter. Just about any kind of writing is interesting to me, so when my church offered a screenwriting class I jumped at the chance. I shared some of the details last Saturday (“My …