The B2B, B2C and A2B markets

Despite their occasional slip-ups, the writers on the publication I work for are capable of great wit and subtlety. Take this sentence from a recent feature:

Sometimes it's easy to forget that vans are in the A2B market

This left me briefly baffled. I knew what B2B was (business to business), and I knew what B2C was (business to consumer). But A2B?

And then it dawned on me – vans are in the A2B market because they, er, take things from A to B. Very nice.

'Chaos Defrost' function on microwave

Never mind the Large Hadron Collider and the hunt for the Higgs boson – I've just spotted that the microwave in our employee restaurant office canteen has a setting with the rather wonderful name of 'Chaos Defrost'.

It's good to see, finally, a useful application for chaos theory.

No, I'm not joking...

Now this is what I call a microwave

Cumulative grammar poetry time!

I was going through my notebooks from a few years ago and I came across this snippet of (for want of a better word) poetry which I thought I would share with you:

A phrasal verb did me in.
A phrase verb and his mate,
who was a non-defining relative clause,
did me in.

(In case you don't get the joke: 'to do someone in' is a phrasal verb, and the third line of the poem is itself a non-defining relative clause.)

Presumably I had intended to continue the poem, introducing more grammatical terms as I went. And presumably it would have almost followed the form of (what I've just discovered is called) a cumulative song.

Don't judge me, OK?

Portmanteau: chat + banter = chanter?

Gingerous – who in the past has asked us such questions as 'can you really have an all-day breakfast?' and 'how heavy is the Apple MacBook Air?' – has emailed us in the following:

In our flat we were frequently using the words 'chat' and 'banter' for similar situations and so to save time we created the portmanteau 'chanter'.

There is a Facebook group we created to try to promote it, just for a bit of fun and to prove to couple of friends that this new word could take off.

We are aware that there are other uses for the word 'chanter'; see the definitions at www.yourdictionary.com/chanter.

I'm not sure, Gingerous, but I suspect that your 'chanter' has a slightly different pronunciation to the other types of 'chanter', at least in our home counties accents.

I assume the first syllable of your 'chanter' rhymes with 'ant' (following 'banter'), whereas the first syllables of the other types of 'chanter' rhyme with 'aunt' – again, at least in our accents. In many other British accents, however, all those 'chanters' would be pronounced identically.

Actually, I don't know about the pronunciation of the chanter that is "that pipe of a bagpipe with finger holes on which the melody is played" as it's a new one on me. And is this where I should mention the Great Vowel Shift?


My question to the floor is: have you coined a word and tried to get it into wider circulation?

Awkward verbs: to rota

A while back I blogged about how 'pro rata' makes an awkward verb as there seems to be no consensus on how the past participle should be written.

I've just thought of another, similar-sounding verb that poses the same problem: 'rota'. Although the Concise OED lists 'rota' as a noun only ("Chiefly Brit. A list showing times and names for people to take their turn to undertake certain duties"), I have heard it used as a verb to mean something along the lines of 'to put into a rota'.

And no, I'm not imagining it: after quite some searching I managed to find a Personnel Today question-and-answer page in which a respondent ('BKay') writes:

Because we work a 7 day week if anyone is rotad to work a b/hol they get the day back in lieu

This writer has chosen 'rotad' as the past participle of 'rota' but I can see arguments for 'rotaed' or even 'rota'd'. What do you reckon?

And are there any other English verbs out there (apart from 'pro rata' and 'rota') whose spelling ends in a consonant and then the letter 'a'?

The longest paragraph

Here on The Engine Room we love superlatives. We've already discussed the longest URL; what about the longest paragraph?

I ask this because some copy was filed recently that contained a 175-word whopper – doubtless not a record-breaker but still rather hefty for a magazine article.

"This writer really hates paragraphs," commented one of my colleagues, also a sub.

"No, he loves them – that's why he makes them as big as possible," I replied.

Any other huge pars out there?

So you want to be an editorial assistant...

I recently wrote a knol with the title 'How to Get into Publishing', and in it I suggested that one common way to gain industry experience was to become an editorial assistant.

Personally, I didn't go down that path – but what does it take to be an editorial assistant? A clue can be found in the 'About me' section of the Editorial Ass blog, which reads as follows:

I'm a recovering editorial assistant. I'm like most of my kind: impoverished coffee-and-gin survivalists, underpaid but ambitious, bitter but hopeful. Painfully self-conscious, woefully self-congratulatory, willfully self-indulgent.

I like that, even though it reminds me of Alanis Morissette lyrics. And so my question to you is: how would you characterise the people that do your job do the same sort of job as you?


Editorial assistant: job description and activities
Knol: how to get into publishing

Headlines: celery eating paramedic

Here's an unintentionally amusing recent headline from the BBC News site - and one that demonstrates the importance of hyphens:

Celery eating paramedic suspended

So eating a paramedic is presumably not acceptable behaviour for celery.

Quite a shocking story, though - and here it is in full. Hopefully the BBC hasn't added a hyphen by the time you look...

Word of the day: Bankenstein

Just a quick portmanteau today as I'm off on an html course in a few minutes.

I spotted the word in question in the free City AM newspaper this morning in an article on the merger of Lloyds TSB and HBOS. I quote:

The marriage of the pair sees the combination of expertise in several specialist areas, creating a superbank, or "Bankenstein", as one analyst put it.

Obviously 'Bankenstein' is a portmanteau of 'bank' and 'Frankenstein' (Frankenstein's monster is pictured below, gesticulating in what appears to be some kind of shop).


UPDATE: I've found a web version of the City AM print story – the 'Bankenstein' quote can be found in the third par down.