Things You Should Know – i.e. vs. e.g.

For the copywriters & the grammar nazis:

The Oatmeal comes up with a handy guide to help you remember when to use i.e. vs e.g. in a sentence.

In advertising, every little detail counts.  Being able to differentiate between i.e. and e.g. may not seem terribly important, but -when the time comes- it could help keep you from looking like a complete idiot, e.g., an incompetent fool, a dispensable dummy, and an ignorant nincompoop.  Oh wait…was it e.g. or i.e.?

See?  It can all be pretty damn confusing.
Good thing there’s a guide:

The Oxford Comma

Word Up – Wisława Szymborska

Image from juliasroom.com

Wisława Szymborska is a Polish poet whose won the Noble Prize in Literature in 1996. “Love at First Sight” is one of her more well known works. It’s such a lovely art piece, and it really makes you rethink the concept of love at first sight.

The poem inspired the Hong Kong-Singaporean Film “Turn Left, Turn Right”.

Watch it. It’s absolutely beautiful.

Word Up – Jeffrey McDaniel

We need more poetry in our lives.
…And more kisses.

Archipelago of Kisses
Jeffrey McDaniel

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s
red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don’t water the kiss with whiskey.
It’ll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.