When you can’t say it in English…
When you can’t say it in English, say it in German.
language, german, common german words in english usage, phrases, expressions
photo: taipei fountain
When you can’t say it in English, say it in German.
language, german, common german words in english usage, phrases, expressions
From William Rowe:
zetcho = the apex of the mountain
tonsei = to shave one’s head and forsake the world
I learned the literal meaning of “karaoke” early last year.
apex, japanese, language, shave and forsake, tonsei, zetcho
It’s hard to be angry with Flickr about unexpected downtime when they post funny things like this.
For my part, this is more than just an excuse to link to DJ Ted Stevens’ Internet Song (yeah, “the internet is a series of tubes”), it’s an excuse to point out how Flickr apparently knows how to speak [...]
…The time for pedantic purism is past; if we wish to communicate with the larger audience, we must use language they understand. We do not have the luxury of defining our words, their definitions are thrust upon us by usage.
I was struck by how much that sounds like something I might have said about libraries [...]
“Bagged products” is little better than “cookery.” I’m gonna bet that no customer has ever asked the sales people for “bagged products,” that nobody’s ever checked the yellow pages for “bagged products,” and without context, nobody would come close to answering a question on what the heck “bagged products” are all about.
But we do have [...]
I loved this quote from Dave Young when I first found it, and I love it more now:
Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.
Read that again, but replace the relevant bits with “user” or “patron” and “your library” or “your databases.”
The point of all this in a post from Jessamyn about understanding what users understand.
Lynne Puckett on the Web4Lib list pointed me to Web Pages That Suck and highlighted this quote from the site:
Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.
They want/need information
They want/need [...]
It looks like bstat has been localized for Japan! With that in mind, I’d love to hear from international users about what I can do to make localization easier. There will be some big changes in the transition to bsuite, and it might be a good time to make sure I’m properly supporting WP’s translation [...]
