Category Archives: #definethis

Jun 3 2012

Mellifluous Maladroit Meromorphic

Words are where I live.   I know lots of the words.   And with my years of Latin classes,  I am often able to decipher medical and legal expressions.   Although I resoundingly flunked Introduction To Anatomy and Physiology when I made an ill-considered stab at preparing to apply to nursing school.  (Nursing is definitely a profession for which I would be spectacularly ill-suited.)    One of the very few other classes I ever failed was high school geometry.      While I’m great with words and can converse with most anyone,  I am so not good at math and science.     And despite the years of voice lessons that I took back in high school,  I’m afraid that my voice has never been especially mellifluous.     While I speak well and can wax eloquent at times my voice seems only ordinary to me.

I would certainly have been a maladroit had I gone into nursing.    And honestly,  I understand so little math that the definition of meromorphic was more or less meaningless to me.  I feel so fortunate to have finally realized that writing is what I do best and what I should focus most of my efforts upon doing.   As I type this,  I have five posts already written and scheduled,  as well as 17 additional three word titles still to be written about.     I am most certainly in a manic phase as I crank out these blog posts.    After thinking about it for a while  I decided that what I should do about #definethis is to continue blogging a word of the day each day,  and put up missons that are open to anyone with no community or shareholder requirements that drive traffic to the #definethis blog and ASK missionaries to play the word game on Twitter but make clear that everyone is welcome to the eaves just for stopping by.

The more I have worked with missions and experimented with different eligibility criteria,  I’ve come to believe that the best approach is to let absolutely everyone take the eaves.    With simple re-tweet missions I’ve found that I get a 90-99% completion rate.   More complex missions will I believe always have lower completion rates,  though I got a pretty great response rate on a mission asking folks to leave a three word comment for my Just 3 Words project.     Pretty much every player on Empire Avenue has a Twitter account,  so I am thinking that if there is no community to join and no hoops to jump through,  maybe I will attract more players than my somewhat convoluted two communities to join previous approach.

Today’s words were submitted by my friend Diana Lewis,  who is the Community Manager for ResumeBear

May 28 2012

Turnip Toreador Arbitration

Today’s topic was suggested by the inestimable Wayne Hurlbert,  a great voice in podcasting–he interviews thought leaders in business, economics, and technology every Tuesday and Thursday evening on the Blog Business Success radio show.

The word turnip brings to my mind not a root vegetable but a blogger in New Jersey,  who used to blog about a topic that used to interest me and whom I used to know on some web sites that these days are defunct or might as well be.    Dropping by his site and seeing that his last post was a year and a half ago was a bit sad for me.    Many, many people start blogs every day,  and the sad fact is more often than not they do not keep up with their blogs.    As the posts go stale they become less and less attractive.    For those who publish their blogs on a major platform like WordPress.com  or Blogspot.com,  even if they abandon their sites and never log in to their admin panels again,  their ghostly sites will stay up for as long as these big publishers see fit to keep them there.    To me there is something strikingly sad about an abandoned blog.

I am pretty sure I knew before I began writing this post that a toreador is a bull fighter,  although wikipedia’s  disambiguation page for the term did provide me with the useful information that the toreador is the mascot of Boone High School in Boone, Iowa.     What the word actually made me think of was the somewhat similar-sounding word troubadour which was a #definethis word of the day last week.   I am finding #definethis more and more frustrating.    I put out missions every day,  but usually only a handful of people play.    Requiring that people join communities to get the eaves is not working out all that well.    Only two players took advantage 10,000 eaves mission I offered on Friday  (out of 5 or 6 who were eligible).     I find myself thinking that there must be a better way to do this and make the game popular.     I may let #definethis slip on to hiatus until I figure it out.

Arbitration makes me think about a blogger whom I once thought I knew fairly well.    For years we had lived in the same city,  and although we never once met face to face following along in his life via his blog made me come to consider him a friend.    I was pleased to find that Cromley’s blog is still up there and he continues to post regularly.    Once of his best pillar posts is this article about Credit Card Arbitrage that may be genuinely useful to anyone who owns one or more credit cards.   And linking to this guy whom I haven’t really heard from in years is the kind of odd re-connection one may get,  if you continue to maintain a blog for years and years.     And yes,   I know that arbitrage is something distinctly different than arbitration,   and yet as with toreador and troubadour,  what the word most clearly brought to mind for me,   was a different word.    I find myself thinking that is perhaps the be all and end all of being a real word nerd  :)

PS– in reply to all the questions about the Soup For Sluts image,  visit this post to learn how I select the post images.