by Kevin Burton Today I am owning my farm-country standing and taking a look at some phrases we have exported to the rest of the country. Merriam-Webster calls them “barnyard idioms.” I don’t love that name but I must admit some of these phrases are more than a little muddy. From Kansas …
Category Archives: Words
My Prayer To God In His Good Morning
by Kevin Burton What can I say about the morning that poets through the centuries haven’t already said, much better than I can? And what could I tell you about the morning that you don’t already hold in your innermost heart? Answer to both: nothing. With our heads, we know that …
Words For Your Wild, Carefree, Summer
by Kevin Burton Summer has not arrived but planning for summer has. Our friends at Merriam-Webster have provided some words that may or may not describe your 2023 getaway(s). Frankly, I would avoid some of these, but that’s up to you: Jaunty adjective: sprightly in manner or appearance. When jaunty first came into English use …
Standing O For Diane Tirado, My Zero Hero
by Kevin Burton At work you shouldn’t expect pay for, and at school you shouldn’t expect credit for, work you didn’t do. I give you that conclusion up front, lest it be lost in this strange little tale. There is weirdness in this story, I warn you. The first strange thing is …
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What’s Stranger Than Fiction, AND Truth?
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 …
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.” …
Video Killed Your Imagination, Not Radio
I think I’m done writing about MTV and Clear Channel for the moment, but I have one more thought on that Buggles tune, “Video Killed The Radio Star.” I raised the question without answering it in my Friday story: “If you could get your favorite top 40 hits, with pictures, moving pictures, wouldn’t that …
Clear Channel (iHeart) Killed The Radio Star
by Kevin Burton In the old days we turned on our radios for music, for news, for sports and weather forecasts, and we got all those things. But what we really loved, and what kept us coming back for more, was the way those things were delivered, something that was woven throughout the …
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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. …
Board Game Beatdown South Dakota Style
by Kevin Burton My wife and I loved our South Dakota-Nebraska vacation last fall. We really didn’t want to come home. On the way home I kept a Nebraska station on the car radio well past the point where we could actually hear it well enough to recognize a song. “Hey, if …
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