Verbal allergens are buzzwords or phrases that induce an allergic reaction in the reader or listener. My new personal unfavourite is “intentionality”, which has fled from the Philosophy departments of academia to seek refuge in boardrooms & on LinkedIn. Please use with care.

A message on my neighbourhood WhatsApp group today. I xxx South African elections. They bring out the best in us.

Time After Time, it's always a bit of a jolt to realise that your favourite pop stars grow older too, even as their music remains ageless. This is Cyndi Lauper, 70, in the New York Times today.

Well, that didn’t take long: welcome to the Government of National Mutiny.

Well, on the upside, after this sincere "apol-IOL-ogy" (in which his name is misspelled, no doubt due to a technical error) the wrong Mohammed Vawda certainly has some good material for his next standup comedy gig.

A lot of people say Twitter is losing its influence and reach. But the fact that Joe Biden announced his decision to stand down in a tweet, rather than in a statement to the media, is proof that it remains the most powerful platform for reaching a global audience in an instant.

It's astonishing to see, more than two centuries after the storming of the Bastille, that the French STILL have the power to offend people. Long live their proud tradition of radical art, revolutionary style, and righteous disrespect for the gatekeepers of convention!

After the "Last Supper" and the "Male Boxer", it's become clear that the most hotly contested event at the Paris Olympics is the High Jump to Completely the Wrong Conclusion.

I use AI speech-to-text apps extensively on my Mac, & they are amazingly accurate. But occasionally, when they encounter a word in a language other than English, they can glitch. My favourite mistranscription to date is "red-outed bears" for Red Hartebeest.

I like the term “sellsword”, as used on Game of Thrones, to describe someone who sells words for a living. It's so much more hopeful than “freelance”, which also comes from the days of the knights, but creates the misleading impression that one's services are available for free.

People who say "My 5-year-old can dance better than Rachael Gunn" are exactly the same as people who look at modern art & say "My 5-year-old can paint better than that". Good! Then let them dance, let them paint, rather than use them as a benchmark to denigrate other people.

Fun language fact: the Germans also have a word for "ja-nee", the classic Afrikaans expression of existential ambivalence. It is "Jein", a cross between "Ja" und "Nein". Nothing, however, beats ja well no fine, which is not so much an expression as an entire philosophy.

I'm always on the "lookout" for "unecessary" quotation marks. I saw a "fine" example on a "sign" in Somerset West today.

The South African consumer feedback site, Hello Peter, uses an automated profanity filter that is almost psychic in its ability to detect and exise the social indelicacies that lurk within even the most seemingly innocent words. This one took me a while to figure out.

I have seen the future, through the eyes of AI: the new visual mode in the Advanced Voice Model of ChatGPT Plus. It's a giant leap forward for the technology, opening up a world of possibilities for insight, understanding, and engagement. See for yourself! axios.com/2024/12/12/cha…

Make America Great Trek Again.

Today my Gen Z daughter asked me, have you ever heard of a band called A-ha? "A-ha!" I said, & I showed her the famous video for Take On Me. She was astounded. "Wow, this is SO cool!" I felt like an archaeologist, sharing an artefact from ancient days. youtube.com/watch?v=djV11X…

The lead story in my local paper today is about a big hole in Johannesburg. That in itself is not newsworthy. Johannesburg is gatvol of big holes. The difference is that this particular hole sounds more dangerous than all the others, since it is described as an “eye saw”.

Hey, fellow AI nerds: if you'd like to try Perplexity's new Comet web browser, I have three invites, which I'm happy to give to the first three AI-nerd respondents. I love the Comet browser and have made it my default. It reinvents web-surfing for the AI era.