Day Eight - Learning American English

I drove to the office this morning hoping for a quiet day and to get some time to prepare for Christmas, but my plans were thwarted when I had a call from a customer with a problem. It took the best part of the day to solve their situation, and because of the nature of it we didn’t earn anything, but it felt good to be doing something constructive and they were very happy in the end.

Something I’ve learned over the years is that even when you have a customer service problem, or have let someone down, by actually handling it well, you can bring their satisfaction level up higher than it would have been in the first place – bizarre, but true!

The net result is that I didn’t get any Christmas stuff done, so I will have to do it on Christmas Eve. I always did that anyway as a youngster, so it will be like old times.

We’ve already had conversations with the kids explaining times are very hard, so they won’t be getting the usual haul of presents, but that we will take them shopping in the sales in January, so here’s hoping we have the money to actually do that. Kids are very adaptable, and seem to deal with tough times well – as long as we can keep feeding them and keep their internet online, they’re pretty happy.

We live in a small village in Europe, and Christmas has been in the air for the last couple of weeks. Decorations are everywhere and people are more than usually smiley. It makes it doubly hard when you don’t feel the same way, and every false “Merry Christmas” I dish out with a big smile grates on me for its falseness. It’s not that I don’t want people to have a terrific time, it’s just that I don’t feel that lightness in my heart which should go with the sentiment.

Our family member who has been in hospital comes out tomorrow, so that will be good news and he will be at his home for Christmas, and I was really hoping for that. I can’t imagine being stuck in hospital over the festive season.

I’ve had a bit of a rethink on how to handle this blog. I think it’s best if I keep the two sections completely separate. In other words, in this section I will only post every day about my life and what is going on, together with my reflections on various things.

It dawned on me that there will be some people who only want to read about the blog itself and some who will only want to read about my life, so putting site stats and earnings into this side of the blog may not be of any interest. Talking of earnings, it did occur to me that I may be in breach of Adsense terms of service if I detail my earnings from the site every day. So in future I’m going to give an approximation of what I’ve earned, and not detail the source of the income. Not a big issue so far, as we have always been “less than a dollar”!

In the evening, I did quite a lot more work on the blog itself, and I’ll detail that in a post on the other section shortly. But, carrying out my net research made me reflect on blogging language and the use of American terms in general, and I thought I’d share it with you:

As with most things, blogging has developed a language of it’s own, and one of the first challenges is to understand what on earth people are talking about. Here are some examples which were totally alien to me a couple of weeks ago:
Twitter
Digg
Uniques
CTR
Page Rank
CMS
Plug ins

I could go on and on, but you do quickly become adept at seeing a word, Googling it and then incorporating it into your own vocabulary.

As the US are the world leaders in blogging, many of the terms have a distinctly US flavor to them, and I had a little internal giggle when I started thinking about the difference in the way Americans and British speak the same (on the face of it) language. I’m neither nationality, but I was educated in Britain, so my style is more theirs.

Americans love their acronyms – watch any episode of CSI (pun intended!) and hear them talk about GSR on a DB, while they charge around in their SUV's!

Another habit they have is to turn nouns into verbs. I first noticed the trend when I heard Storming Norman declare after the first Gulf war that his troops were now “Recreating” in Dubai. Just what were they re – creating? Blogging does this as well, you frequently read about “Monetizing” a site, for example.

I also find the American way of lengthening vowels, when using European words, to be hilarious. Pasta becomes “parster” and Milan becomes “Milarn”

I hope these observations won’t offend any US readers, they are not meant to, and when I have a moment I will dish out the same treatment to the Brits, although there’s only a small proportion of them that I can understand a lot of the time!
That’s all for now, I’ll post my stats for the day, what I’ve done to the blog and my earnings on the other side of the site later on.