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I just bought The New Glucose Revolution to give to my girlfriend. She's complaining that she needs to lose weight (ok, she's a size 20-something and 5'4") and she's in the throes of starving herself. She let me know today that she's feeling a bit woo-woo from her "diet". Argh!! I resisted the urge to go round and bitch-slap her (I was at work and she's an hour's drive away), and bought the book, which is the bible of the whole GI (glycemic index - glucose absorption rates of different foods) area.
It could discuss a lot more about GL (glycemic load - the GI of a food as a function of the total amount of carbs it contains), which I think is a better scale because it's easier to calculate and doesn't give wierdness like saying watermelon isn't so desirable as a fruit because of its high GI. Its GL is low. The reason for the high GI is that the carbohydrate in watermelon is absorbed almost as fast as sucrose is; however, because a watermelon is 90% water, you're actually consuming very little carbohydrate for the weight of what you eat. Still, this book is a good start, and it does actually give GLs in its tables, even if it's far too dismissive of them in the text.
Getting to the peeve point, the book bloody well keeps citing commercially prepared foods with a stupid ™ symbol. Things like Weetbix™, Burgen™ etc etc etc blah blah bloody blah. A trademark is defined as:
... any word (Poison), name (Giorgio Armani), symbol or device (the Pillsbury Doughboy), slogan (Got Milk?), package design (Coca-Cola bottle) or combination of these that serves to identify and distinguishes a specific product from others in the market place or in trade.
There is no need at all to use the trademark symbol, unless you are the owner of the trademark and you want to make it absolutely clear that you're claiming it as a trademark. However, it's the name, or the logo, or the combination of colours or sounds that are unique to your product that actually IS the trademark. Any normal Joe Bloggs, who is not an advertising copywriter, does NOT need to use a trademark symbol, except for the purpose of deep irony. So long as the item is set off by some device like Initial Caps, like any proper name, and the trademarked name is preferably used solely as an adjective, not a noun (although "Weetbix cereal" does sound a bit clumsy, but it'd be fine for formal writing), then you are adhering to international law governing trademark citation. Ok? Good. Just tell all those book editors the same thing (non-fiction books being the worst).
Other peeve du jour: this is purely grammatical, although (obviously) I am NOT a grammar expert. But this one is getting more common, and it tweaks me mightily. Less versus fewer. If there is one of something, you have less of it. If you have lots of somethings, you have fewer of them. You have less cash after visiting the gaming parlour, and undoubtedly fewer coins. Quite often people will substitute the fewer with less, like "I had a lot less coins after that game, which totally sucked me in". Wrong wrong wrong. You would never say "I had a lot fewer cash". It's the same the other way round.
Think of the kind of thing you have, like milk. Milk, because of its nature, is a single item. You drink some of the milk, you have less of it. But, if you have lots of bottles of milk, those are many items. If you drink 3 of your pint bottles of milk, you have fewer milk bottles remaining (assuming you dispose of them when empty), although you will still have less milk too. A simple reminder: if you use the pronoun it to refer to an item, you have less of it; if you say them to refer to the items, you will end up with fewer.
Now for the frivolity: I had a dream last night ( and it was fairly graphic )
Edit: For embarrassing spelling mistake. And check out![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eringryffin's comment below on counting to differentiate between less/fewer.
It could discuss a lot more about GL (glycemic load - the GI of a food as a function of the total amount of carbs it contains), which I think is a better scale because it's easier to calculate and doesn't give wierdness like saying watermelon isn't so desirable as a fruit because of its high GI. Its GL is low. The reason for the high GI is that the carbohydrate in watermelon is absorbed almost as fast as sucrose is; however, because a watermelon is 90% water, you're actually consuming very little carbohydrate for the weight of what you eat. Still, this book is a good start, and it does actually give GLs in its tables, even if it's far too dismissive of them in the text.
Getting to the peeve point, the book bloody well keeps citing commercially prepared foods with a stupid ™ symbol. Things like Weetbix™, Burgen™ etc etc etc blah blah bloody blah. A trademark is defined as:
... any word (Poison), name (Giorgio Armani), symbol or device (the Pillsbury Doughboy), slogan (Got Milk?), package design (Coca-Cola bottle) or combination of these that serves to identify and distinguishes a specific product from others in the market place or in trade.
There is no need at all to use the trademark symbol, unless you are the owner of the trademark and you want to make it absolutely clear that you're claiming it as a trademark. However, it's the name, or the logo, or the combination of colours or sounds that are unique to your product that actually IS the trademark. Any normal Joe Bloggs, who is not an advertising copywriter, does NOT need to use a trademark symbol, except for the purpose of deep irony. So long as the item is set off by some device like Initial Caps, like any proper name, and the trademarked name is preferably used solely as an adjective, not a noun (although "Weetbix cereal" does sound a bit clumsy, but it'd be fine for formal writing), then you are adhering to international law governing trademark citation. Ok? Good. Just tell all those book editors the same thing (non-fiction books being the worst).
Other peeve du jour: this is purely grammatical, although (obviously) I am NOT a grammar expert. But this one is getting more common, and it tweaks me mightily. Less versus fewer. If there is one of something, you have less of it. If you have lots of somethings, you have fewer of them. You have less cash after visiting the gaming parlour, and undoubtedly fewer coins. Quite often people will substitute the fewer with less, like "I had a lot less coins after that game, which totally sucked me in". Wrong wrong wrong. You would never say "I had a lot fewer cash". It's the same the other way round.
Think of the kind of thing you have, like milk. Milk, because of its nature, is a single item. You drink some of the milk, you have less of it. But, if you have lots of bottles of milk, those are many items. If you drink 3 of your pint bottles of milk, you have fewer milk bottles remaining (assuming you dispose of them when empty), although you will still have less milk too. A simple reminder: if you use the pronoun it to refer to an item, you have less of it; if you say them to refer to the items, you will end up with fewer.
Now for the frivolity: I had a dream last night ( and it was fairly graphic )
Edit: For embarrassing spelling mistake. And check out
eringryffin's comment below on counting to differentiate between less/fewer.
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