Hungry Jack's has a very important employee.

Every time I drive through the Hungry Jack's drive-through the following sign catches my attention.

I can't help but wonder who the special employee is that is so important to Hungry Jack's. Of course there isn't a single employee, but an apostrophe out by just one character position can make quite a difference.

Have you seen a sign that catches your attention and amuses you?

Kelvin Eldridge
Creator and maintainer of the preferred Australian English spelling dictionary.
www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au

Apologies for the short outage for looking up the meaning of a word.

Thanks Wendy for letting me know that the link to look up the meaning of a word was not working correctly. This has now been updated and is working as expected.

Apologies to anyone for any inconvenience.

 

Kelvin Eldridge

Online Connections

www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Call 0415 910 703 for computer advice and support.

 

What are 'earworms'?

I read an article recently about earworms and thought “there’s a term that isn’t in my dictionary” and probably shouldn’t currently be in the dictionary. So what then are earworms?

What are 'earworms'?... Read More

Earworms are those tunes that get stuck in your head. I remember one friend at university said he did terrible in an exam because just before the exam started he got a tune in his head and couldn’t get rid of it. Sometimes earworms can be pleasant and sometimes they can be annoying. The problem is that reading about earworms starts you thinking about those tunes that keep playing over and over in your head. Try to shake them and it can be hard.

The good thing is the research shows ways of getting rid of earworms. In effect you need to do something mentally challenging with the example given being anagrams. I’m not good at anagrams so that one is out for me.

It is good that people research things like earworms but I do worry that if they figure out exactly what makes a good earworm and can perfect creating earworms, marketing people will use the knowledge gained to create earworms that we can’t escape from. As always knowledge can be used for good and sometimes, not so good.

Enjoy.

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for help with your computer problem.
Servicing Templestowe, Doncaster, Eltham and the surrounding area.

The word OK turns 174 today. It's OK to celebrate.

It was on this day 174 years ago that that most modest yet useful of words was born. Allan Metcalf, an Illinois professor of English who reckons OK is not just America's most successful word, but may be the greatest word in the English language.... Read More

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for help with your computer problem.
Servicing Templestowe, Doncaster, Eltham and the surrounding area.

Password again required to access Word Check

I've made Word Check available without restriction to the general public for many months now. Thousands of people a month use Word Check to check the spelling of words and also to see if they're using the preferred Australian English spelling, but unfortunately I find people just come and go and contribute nothing in return.

There's nothing wrong with this as this is how we all are on the internet. With open source software I found most people took and very few gave anything back and that included the open source projects who also used my work such a Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Unfortunately I can't be that generous as I have a family to support so my time has to now be focused on the people who value my time and efforts sufficiently to give something in return.

My apologies for any inconvenience.


Kelvin Eldridge
Online Connections
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for computer support.
Servicing Templestowe, Doncaster, Eltham and the surrounding area.

Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is now available for Australians.

Exciting news.

Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 has now been released by Microsoft and is available for download. I’ve downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 10 and also installed the preferred Australian English spelling file I provide to clients and it works as expected. Now thousands of secondary spelling variations which exist in the standard Australian English dictionary provided by Microsoft, will be marked as spelling errors. Now “mom” for example will be marked as a spelling error, as will the many “ize” spelling variations, American spellings and errors I’ve identified in the standard dictionary.

At last the preferred Australian English spelling can now be made available to Internet Explorer 10 users on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.

In the next couple of days I’ll update the instructions for Windows 7, but for those who can’t wait, go to http://www.australian-dictionary.com.au/internet-explorer/ and purchase a copy of the preferred Australian English spelling file. The steps to install the file are the same.

 

Kelvin Eldridge

Online Connections

www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Call 0415 910 703 for computer advice and support.

 

Is it wellbeing or well-being?

When researching the words wellbeing and well-being, the Australian Oxford doesn't list wellbeing at all, but the Macquarie dictionary lists wellbeing as the primary spelling and well-being as a secondary spelling.

When I find inconsistency in the leading authoritative references in Australia, I like to check Australian usage. Previously Yahoo was an excellent search engine to use, but over time this has become less so. Google isn't that good either. If you search using Pages from Australia with Google, you'd expect to get pages from Australia, but what you actually get I really can't say, making it pretty useless for any analysis.

Google however enables people to create their own search engine. A while ago I created a search engine to only include sites which have a .au domain (http://www.justlocal.com.au/search/australia/). Using the subset of pages produced by the custom search engine you get a good feeling as to the use of words in Australia.

Using http://www.justlocal.com.au/search/australia/ and searching for wellbeing and well-being, the results are 3.57 million and 1.38 million pages respectively. A good indication that wellbeing is now used considerably more than well-being and thus supporting the entry in the Macquarie dictionary as compared to the Australian Oxford dictionary.

My dictionary work aims to provide the preferred Australian English spelling of words, which means when checking the two words using Word Check (http://www.australian-dictionary.com.au/wordcheck/), the preferred spelling in Australia is wellbeing.

Kelvin Eldridge
Online Connections
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for computer support.
Servicing Templestowe, Doncaster, Eltham and the surrounding area.