Sublime

Assistant: . . . I beg your pardon? Mr Pest: No, Edmund Wells. Assistant: . . . I think you’ll find Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield, sir. Mr Pest: No, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield with two ‘p’s. This is David Coperfield with one ‘p’ by Edmund Wells. Assistant: (a little sharply) Well, in that case we don’t have it. Mr Pest: Funny

we should install a little mental bell that rings when we’re using expressions that are second-hand or blurred through too much use.

1. In all the time I’ve spent watching people use the Web, the thing that has struck me most is the difference between how we think people use Web sites and how they actually use them. When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading all of our carefully crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized things

This term comes from Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card’s “information foraging” research at Xerox PARC in which they drew parallels between people seeking information (“informavores”) and animals following the scent of their prey.

St. Antoine, the patron saint of truffle growers,

Bill Walsh (who I’ve described exclusively as my personal hero since first picking up a copy of his essential text The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English