Category Archives: Writing

Dear Congressman: your auto-response sucks.

Thursday 1/3/2008 – 9:38 pm

Congressman Xavier Becerra’s web site was recognized as best among the house membership by the Congressional Management Foundation. Heady stuff. Mr. Becerra is proud enough of this fact to trumpet it on his quarterly (print) newsletter, so I decided to have a look, navigated to said website, and fired off a message via the handy […]

By Jon Plummer | Comments (0)

Usage note: Tact vs. Tack

Sunday 5/30/2004 – 5:36 pm

A usage error borne of misunderstanding has nearly replaced correctness with a caricature. I am not referring to rending/rendering, made popular by fresh-faced local news reporters standing before “heart-rendering” scenes of depravity and destruction (rendering a heart, of course, would involve sketching it on paper or cooking it to release any fats contained within); rather […]

By Jon Plummer | Comments (0)

Usage note: Discreet vs. Discrete

Sunday 5/30/2004 – 5:24 pm

I am not a cantankerous person. While I strive to be precise, I am generally tolerant of common levels of error and imprecision. But when a mistake seems to be entering the vernacular, when it might have once been a spelling error and is fast becoming an error of thought, I must speak.

discreet

1. Marked […]

By Jon Plummer | Comments (0)

Galvanic Skin Response

Thursday 4/8/2004 – 8:44 pm

(GSR) The change in the electrical resistance of the skin following stimulation; an easily measured variable widely used in experimental studies.

By Jon Plummer | Comments (0)