Gone-fishin' CBC Radio host Costas Halavrezos muses about his ego-lite broadcasting style on the veteran's last Maritime Noon broadcast: [A]s listeners, you've noticed I play my personal cards close to my chest. I don't tell cute family anecdotes or talk about my favourite sports teams or what I had for breakfast, because I believe every second of broadcast time is precious, and well, the majority of you don't get to communicate with other Maritimers every day like I do, so it's best if I stay out of the way and free up the space. This is but a variant of E.B. White's...

19 September, 2010

Anand Girisharadas of the New York Times addresses a weighty issue that threatens to become a regular topic on Contrarian: use of conjunction "so" to begin a sentence. He notes a National Public Radio interview in which fully one quarter of the sentences began with "so." While Girisharadas dredges up a 14th century poem in which Chaucer begins a sentence with "so," he cites scholars who trace the recent boom in introductory so's to Silicon Valley, or perhaps to Microsoft employees. In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of...

01 June, 2010

Lindsay Brown doesn't like anonymous posting: The good news here is that Halifax media are inadvertently leading the charge against the silly practice of anonymous online commentary. First, in April, The Coast demonstrated that the mere possibility of court action was enough for it to de-cloak its posters. Now, The Chronicle-Herald has shown us that its promise of anonymity depends on who you are. Apparently, the promise is worthless if the Herald thinks it can get a story out of identifying you. They'll even go to the trouble of hunting you down. So, anonymous poster, beware. The Herald has also exposed in a dramatic...

23 May, 2010

Contrarian has some highbrow friends, including Mike Targett, who weighs into the begrudgery debate quoting Wittgenstein:  "The meaning of a word is its use in the language." That is the classic formulation of descriptivism, the reigning philosophy among lexicographers. The trouble with descriptivism is that it leads to definitions like this one, from Merriam-Webster: "biweekly: 1. occurring twice a week; 2. occurring every two weeks." It's true, people use biweekly to mean both things, but sometimes you need a prescriptive dictionary to tell you what a word really means. I'm with Lindsay Brown on that score....

23 May, 2010

An Ontario Divisional Court ruling has thrown the The Coast's craven cave-in to an HRM Fire Service lawsuit into sharp relief—along with an imprudent ruling by Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Heather Robertson. The Chief and Deputy Chief of the fire service asked Robertson to order The Coast to release identifying information about individuals who posted anonymous comments about alleged racism in the fire service on the newspaper's website. The officers said the comments, since removed, defamed them, and they needed the identities of the authors to pursue a suit for defamation. Having lured readers into posting anonymously, the Coast tossed them...

12 May, 2010

We've read a lot lately about the value of swift, full, and forthright apologies when public figures screw up. What about companies that screw up? Blippy is a website that lets users trade updates about their consumer purchases. Recently, an obscure programming error, compounded by mistakes at Google and one small midwestern bank, allowed Google to index the credit card numbers of four or five Blippy customers, potentially exposing these numbers to people browsing the web. Co-founder & CEO Ashvin Kumar's apology to users could serve as a model for companies that find themselves in a similar pickle. Moneyquote: It has been...

11 May, 2010

Contrarian reader M. Austin writes: Your reporting on Go Ogle taking the pi** out of some has brought to my attention the fact that whiz is spelled with an h. This realisation has me looking at Velveeta's jarred cousin with suspicion....

10 May, 2010

Contrarian reader Dave Atkinson writes: Both you and Bill Turpin used the word "fulsomely" to describe an apology. I assume you both know what you're doing. How droll. Bill and I probably knew once, but we, or at least I, forgot. William Safire rises from the dead to remind us. (As a bonus, he throws in "noisome" and "enormity.") [Update] Bill T. didn't forget after all: Sheesh! I've been lectured by Harry Flemming on the use of fulsome, so I chose it with care to describe The Coast's apology, and did so because of its ambiguity. It's nice that Dave Atkinson picked up on it, but...

20 April, 2010

The Halifax Fire Marshall temporarily halted a reading by Alistair MacLeod (standing, back to camera, left side of photo) tonight so the overflow crowd of more than 600 could be rearranged to clear clogged aisles. Officials turned away another 100 people as the 73-year-old MacLeod, who splits his time between Windsor, Ontario, and Dunvegan, Cape Breton, read his 1976 story, The Closing Down of Summer. The Saint Mary's University event marked the first time MacLeod had publicly read the story in its entirety. Moneyquote: When I write a story, when I'm halfway through, I write the last sentence. I think of...

12 March, 2010
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