A fierce debate has been going on for sometime over on the Grammar Girl group at LinkedIn. I have enjoyed it emmensely. And, actually, it’s not fierce. It’s acutally quite fun. With lots of lighthearted anecdotes and gentle remarks to one another.
The discussion is about pronouns.
Gender neutral pronoouns, to be exact. Should we use he, she it — or they — when we are speaking about a singular person whose gender we do not know? And, to complicate this a bit further, what about when the gender of the person is ambiguous? Genderqueer. It’s all so complicated.

Yesterday, my status said “LOL turned 25 the other day.” A friend tagged me in a selfie and posted it to my wall. Then someone unfriended me. Was it because of the selfie? Or because they were offended that I posted “LOL turned 25″.
I meant, of course, that LOL literally turned 25. I’m of course much, much older.

​It’s true. Some of the most common words we use are Arabic in origin. We thought it might be fun to do a little quiz to see if you could tell which of the following groups of words are Arabic in origin. In each group, two are Arabic and one is not. Guess which word is not Arabic, and you are allowed to think you’re smart.

It’s important to remember that those employee handbooks and other human resources documents you provide your employees with need to communicate policy.
You may feel, and rightly so, that you have more important, or at least more urgent, places to spend your money. We can certainly understand that. Especially for small to medium size enterprises, thinking about translation of internal documents can be stressful. After all, how in the world does this money spent translate into ROI?
We get it. You’ve got to focus on things that make money. To a large extent, we agree with you, and constantly have that mantra in our own office: “But does it make money?” We ask this about everything that comes across our desks, and usually, if there’s no foreseeable, tangible ROI, the project is scrapped.
But at the same time, it’s important to build a strong foundation. If your business lays out its policies and expectations early and in a well documented way, you will save money in the long run. And not only in potential law suits, though that is a concern. Simply in productivity and better customer service from employees who feel heard and respected.

Ha’, tlhIngan jatlh.
Klingon fans rejoice! You’ve been diligently learning a made-up language for years, only to experience the misunderstanding of mainstream society. But now…
chenmoH Hol Qat!
​Made up languages are popular! The well-known machine translator, Bing, offers Klingon as a legitimate language choice (go ahead, try it out with the phrases we’ve included) and Living Languages now includes Dothraki as a language you can learn using their system. LanguageTran hasn’t yet hired an English to Klingon translator yet, but…well…it does seem like that’s the direction the culture is moving in. I wouldn’t get an advanced degree in Klingon or Dothraki just yet, but all signs are pointing to being able to do that one day…