mike's web log

The 20% that the 80% need: Part 2

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:57:16 GMT

In an earlier post, I talked about how many products have a user interface (UI) that's jammed with features that most people don't need or use. Your stove, your digital camera, Microsoft Word :) — there's just so much stuff to wade through to achieve a few basic functions.[1]

A nice UI

Why is this, and how should product UIs be designed?

The why part has many branches. Let's start with feature creep, aka feature-itis. If your product is in a competitive market, and your competitors offer an attractive feature, it's very hard to resist the drive to add that feature to your product also.

Let's say that you make a photo-editing app. Your competitors come out with a "magic eraser" that lets people seamlessly remove objects in the photo, and they tout this feature endlessly in their advertisements. Are you going to be able to say that no, most of your users don't really need that, and it costs a lot to develop, and it junks up your UI?[2] Not likely. Soon enough, your engineers have managed to cram a magic eraser into the ever-lengthening menu options in your product.

UIs can also be bad because they're designed by the wrong people. Jeff Atwood once memorably made this observation [more]

The 20% that the 80% need

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:07:52 GMT

This is not about word processing software, but bear with me, because that's relevant.

When I started working at Google, I was obliged to switch from Microsoft Word to Google Docs. Google Docs is a perfectly capable word processor, but Word has many more features that can let a power user do amazing things.

The interface for Microsoft Word

For the first few weeks I whined about this thing or that thing that I missed from my days of working with Word. (Full disclosure: I am a power user of Word.) A colleague who'd been at Google for a while and reconciled himself to the differences made an observation that gave me perspective. Google Docs, he said, has "the 20% that the 80% need".

The interface for Google Docs

This was a statement about audience and their needs. It's true: for most people, the many powerful features of Word are overkill. People need to create docs, format them, and edit them. For these needs, Google Docs is great. Importantly, it's also comparatively uncluttered — there are fewer choices and less visual noise. Most people are not routinely producing large volumes of text or wielding professional editing tools, tasks for which Word's advanced features are very useful. Thus for 80% of users, the limited set of features (20% of Word's) in Google Docs are fine.[1]

[more]

Cleaving to forms of the past

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:53:27 GMT

English verbs can occasionally involve some "Wait a sec …" moments. For instance, here's an example where even a native speaker might hesitate a moment. How would you fill in the blanks?

Today he ______ (cleave) the tree with an ax.
Yesterday he ______ (cleave) the tree with an ax.
The tree was ________ (cleave) with an ax.

The verb cleave is old; we inherited it from Old English, where it was the verb cleofan. And this is where our issues of today started. In OE, it was an irregular ("strong") verb — to mark the past tense, it changed vowels and its participle ended in -n (like fly > flew > flown). Let's look at the OE versions of the sentences from earlier:

Todæg he cliefþ æxe þone beam.
Giestrandæge he cleaf æxe þone beam.
Se beam wierþ æxe geclofen.

But as happened with some other verbs that started as irregular/strong (help, laugh), cleave developed a regular ("weak") form, where the past tense ended in -ed/it. Unlike a verb like help, though, cleave hung on to remnants of its irregular/strong past.

The result is that now we have quite a choice of past tense forms! He cleaved/cleft/clove the tree, the tree was cleaved, it was cleft, it was cloven.

I was thinking about this because I ran across an instance of cloven recently in an unexpected (to me) place:

(source)

I think that while all of the past tense forms are technically correct, there might be affinities there. For example, we say a cloven hoof or cleft hoof, but apparently we don't say *cleaved hoof.

[more]

Panama, Part 5: Darién

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:07:05 GMT

Continuing a series of blog posts about our recent trip to Panama.

Part 1: Panama City
Part 2: The Cruise Begins
Part 3: Through the Canal
Part 4: Into the Pacific
Part 5: Darién (this entry)

Our last two days were spent in Darién, the part of Panama that borders Colombia. This is real jungle, an area renowned for its inhospitality.[1] Fun fact that I only recently learned: the Darién Gap is not a gap that takes you through the area (a mountain pass, say); instead, the Darien area constitutes a gap in the Pan-American Highway between Central and South America. You can walk across this gap (extremely not recommended) or, more likely, go around Darién on a boat. Let us know how that goes.

However, people do live there, and our first stop was at Playa Muerto, which is a village of the Eberá people. This visit presented some additional touristical quandaries for me — were we respectfully learning about an indigenous culture, or were we gawping at something exotic? I was initially reluctant to just point my camera at our hosts and snap photos.

I discussed this with a thoughtful fellow passenger who noted that the villagers are not culturally isolated and have made their own choice about welcoming visitors. (There's an AirBnB in the village, I eventually learned.)

[more]

Panama, Part 4: Into the Pacific

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:59:16 GMT

Continuing a series of blog posts about our recent trip to Panama.

Part 1: Panama City
Part 2: The Cruise Begins
Part 3: Through the Canal
Part 4: Into the Pacific (this entry)
Part 5: Darién

Our next day we were in the Pearl Islands, where we did some Zodiac-based birdwatching. I think this is typical of any of these cruises: there were a lot of birders on the trip. I'm not really a birder, but this was interesting to me in a meta kind of way. For example, birders can spot birds (or anything, really) that I sometimes had trouble seeing even when they were pointed out.

Our guide pointing out seabirds of interest

Also, some of the birders have some serious camera equipment. (Another quotable quote from the NatGeo photographer: "If you want to make any photo better, put a bird in it.") Also, the guides know an incredible amount about birds. This last I observed over and over as we proceeded.

Serious photographers

[more]

Panama, Part 3: Through the Canal

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:46:32 GMT

Continuing a series of blog posts about our recent trip to Panama.

Part 1: Panama City
Part 2: The Cruise Begins
Part 3: Through the Canal (this entry)
Part 4: Into the Pacific
Part 5: Darién

We took this particular cruise because I was interested in the Panama Canal. As you'll hear repeatedly in anything that discusses the canal, it was and still is one of the great engineering feats ever.

For centuries people dreamed about a way to cut through the skinny parts of Central America to avoid the long route around the bottom of South America. After the triumph of the Suez Canal in 1869, the same French engineer undertook the Panama Canal. However, the French made the error (clear only in retrospect) of envisioning a sea-level canal, as they'd built in Suez. That wasn't possible.

The Americans took an interest for Monroe-Doctrinal reasons, sort of, fostered Panamanian independence from Colombia (ahem) in 1903, then got the necessary concessions. The successful formula turned out to be to dam the wild Changres river to create a huge inland lake — Gatún Lake — above sea level. The designers then created locks on both ends of the lake. All of this took 11 years — the canal opened in August 1914, the month that WWI started. Fun geographic fact: once the canal opened, the Changres River technically became the only river that drains into both the Pacific and the Atlantic.

Gatún Lake, created as part of the canal construction

[more]

Panama, Part 2: The Cruise Begins

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:42:18 GMT

Continuing a series of blog posts about our recent trip to Panama.

Part 1: Panama City
Part 2: The Cruise Begins (this entry)
Part 3: Through the Canal
Part 4: Into the Pacific
Part 5: Darién

On the appointed day, cruise passengers assembled, and we were then bussed across the isthmus from Panama City (Pacific) to Colón (Caribbean). I guess I envisioned the canal as traversing east from the Caribbean to west at the Pacific. Nope: the canal goes more or less north–south.[1] It's about an hour's drive across the isthmus — 50 miles or so.

Map of Panama Canal

We embarked, and all 80 or so passengers were mustered to the lounge to get the first presentation (abandon-ship drill) and an overview of life aboard the ship, Lindblad-style. As anyone who's cruised probably knows, the crew and staff are numerous, and there's a ton of work, mostly invisible to us, to make a trip like this seem friction-free. And indeed, so it proved to be. I should note that our cabin was quite comfortable, no complaints here.[2] The food was good, vegetarian-friendly, inspired by local cuisine.

View out our window-slash-porthole. (It did not open, in case you were wondering.)

[more]

Panama, Part 1: Panama City

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:30:55 GMT

For our mid-winter break this year, we went on a Panama cruise. It was a kind of experiment. I've been leery of cruises in general, but the idea of going through the Panama Canal was very interesting to me. Some of our friends had enjoyed and recommended high-end, small-ship cruises. We also know some folks who've been naturalists for National Geographic; they've very knowledgeable and generous with their knowledge. So we signed up for a National Geographic/Lindblad tour.

I've written this up in a sequence of blog posts:

Part 1: Panama City (this entry)
Part 2: The Cruise Begins
Part 3: Through the Canal
Part 4: Into the Pacific
Part 5: Darién

This was our trip, apologies for my subprofessional drawing skills:

Our Panama cruise

Legend/summary:

1. Panama City (3 days). Bus trip (red) to Colón and embarkation.
2. Portobelo, then canal part 1.
3. Barro Colorado Island in Gatún Lake, then part 2 of the canal.
4-5. Pearl Islands.
6. Playa Muerto in the Darién province.
7. Punta Patiño in Darién, then back to Panama City.

As a prelude to this trip, we visited the travel doctor. They have all these questions: where exactly [more]

The Life of "St. Arthur" in Old English

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:12:06 GMT

Here's the final exercise that I did for our Old English poetry class. During that week we read something written in what's called metrical prose — it's essentially prose, but apparently Anglo-Saxon writers still liked their rhythms and their alliteration. ("Prose shaped like song" — Paull Franklin Baum) Unlike poetry, metrical prose isn't too concerned about the fussier metrical rules, and it doesn't include fancy kennings/metaphors.

A frequent topic of metrical prose was the life of a saint, such as Ælfric's Life of Saint Oswald. It's easy to imagine these pieces as entertaining (and, importantly, edifying) texts that were read out loud while monks ate their meals.

Our assignment was to write something in metrical prose that was kind of hagiographic. Here you go! :)

Wæs on þām tīdum yfel ealdum, micel unsibb wæs on þām lande,
In those days there was ancient evil, great unrest was in the land,

mǣnige fīend wǣron feorrancumen and āfeohtan woldon.
many enemies were come from far away and wanted to fight.

Se eþelweard Engla, Uther wæs hē gehāten,
The king of the English, he was named Uther

on weg gehworfen wæs, þus wearþ rīce hlāforde bedroren.
had passed away, thus the realm was bereaved of a lord.

Cnapa on þām lande lifde, cnihte tō his brēþer.
A boy lived in that land, a squire to his brother.

Artur wæs his nama; þes esne his mǣge wel þēowode.
His name was Arthur; this servant served his relative well.

[more]

52 things I learned this year

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:33:24 GMT

Some folks these days write up year-end pieces on 52 things they've learned in the preceding months — Tom Whitwell was the first one I encountered, and Nancy Friedman has written roundups as well. This year I managed my own! A 52-item list of things I learned is offered here for your inspection and possible amusement/enjoyment.

The Wikipedia article about the Ship of Theseus has been edited so many times that not a single original sentence remains. I've seen this claim several times, but I don't know how you'd verify it. From a Reddit thread.
The word squeegee is older than I thought. If you'd asked me, I would have guessed that it was a genericized trademark. But no; it's probably a nautical term from as early as the 1840s that might have referred to a mop or mopping. From Etymonline.
In the US, pickup trucks have gotten much bigger, and the cabin size has gotten much bigger in proportion to bed (cargo) size. This is best illustrated by a couple of charts. Here's a size comparison over time from Business Insider:

And here's the change in the proportion of cab to bed from the Diminished Value of Georgia site:

[more]

Christmas song superlatives

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:04:57 GMT

It is (was?) a tradition in high school annuals to have a selection of "senior superlatives" — "best looking", "funniest", "most likely to succeed", like that. I was thinking about Christmas songs and thought we should devise superlatives for those as well. Here are my votes.

Weirdest premise: "Little Drummer Boy"

Least Christmas-y "Christmas" song: "Hallelujah" (Leonard Cohen). Honorable mention: "River" (Joni Mitchell). Second runner-up: "My Favorite Things"

Most suggestive: "Santa Baby"

Most likely to inspire you to break up with your true love: "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

Most repetitive: "Feliz Navidad". Honorable (though at least amusing) mention: "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

Most dismaying example of social capital as a function of recognition by influencers: "Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer"

Most likely to get someone in trouble: "Baby, It's Cold Outside"

Creepiest 24/7 surveillance: "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town"

[more]

For lack of a nut

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 12:59:37 GMT

I have an electric ukulele, which has a jack on the side:

At some point I noticed that the jack had come loose — the nut that holds the jack tight had come off and disappeared and the jack had fallen back into the body of the ukulele.

Well, I thought, I'll go get a replacement nut to hold the jack in place. The first thing I had to figure out was what exactly I was looking for. The nut that holds the jack tight is called a jack nut (reasonably) or a switch nut (because it's used in electronics to hold switches tight):

I started at my local Ace Hardware, but no joy there. Then I went to the "good" hardware stores, which in our area are McLendon Hardware[1] and Dunn Lumber. At those types of hardware stores you can talk to folks who know their inventory, and indeed, I was directed to the hardware drawer where they keep their switch nut-type stuff. But still no joy; nothing in their cabinets fit the jack on my uke. Most peculiar.
At that point I decided that I should contact the company I'd gotten the uke from, a small firm that I think (?) is in Oregon. After some back and forth I managed to convey what the issue was. They were then happy to send me a replacement nut. But … it didn't fit. Given how hard it had been to try to get sizing info for the nut, I wasn't sure that going back and forth with them was going to be fruitful.

Ok, I decided, time to go to the real [more]

Cattes wīsdōm/Cat wisdom

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:46:58 GMT

This week's Old English reading was a poem that goes by the name "Precepts", in which a father ~~lectures his son~~ dispenses life wisdom. You can read a modern English translation; here's a sample:

A fourth time the father taught again
his mind-beloved son, so that he remembered this:
“Abandon not your most intimate friend,
but ever always keep him close—
as is rightly fitting. Perform this courtesy,
so that you never become vile to your own friend.”

... and so on.

Well, heck, I knew someone around our own household who attempts to dispense wisdom in this way every morning. Thus my attempt at a precept.

Þus catte cræftglēaw, ful cene socc-þēof,
Thus the wise cat, very keen sock-thief,

āgendfrēan idelne undierne lǣrde,
the lazy owner clearly admonished,

hlaforde hlȳdde, uht-hlemman cȳþde:
to the master clamored, with dawn-noise said:

"Nǣfre ne lata þū on lof-dǣde, þǣt lēof-dēor forhyge,
"Never be late with glory-deeds, don't ignore the dear-animal,

þearfan þīnes hūs-þegnes. Beþence nīede,
the needs of your house-thane. Consider the distress,

gelǣste langoþum þīnes lēo-cynnes.
attend to the longings of your lion-kin.

[more]

I speak for the trees ... in Old English

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 13:39:25 GMT

One more, I think. Our assignment for the Old English class this week was …

Write 8–12 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse retelling a fable. It should end with a moral, or a bit of proverbial wisdom. Include 5 formulae. Use the Beowulf poet’s technique of following a description of an event with a lesson. Often these morals take the form: swā sceal… or swylc sceal….

People retold some excellent fables — The Scorpion and the Frog, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and The Peacock and the Crane. One person retold Schleicher's fable (!), which was originally a fable written in reconstructed Proto Indo-European about a sheep and some horses.[1]

Anyway, I (as usual) didn't entirely follow the assignment, and I retold a more modern "fable" about capitalism written in 1971. The tale concerns a greedy Once-ler, a forest of profitable Truffula trees, the inhabitants of the woods, and a moralizing Lorax.

Gieddaþ glēomann fram gēardagum
Sings the minstrel from days gone by

bē wuda wrǣtlicum, wealde geþūfum,
about the wondrous woods, the leafy forest,

grāfe geapum grēne standan,
the spacious grove standing green,

trēowa getrumum, Truffula hāten.
the troop of trees called Truffula.
[more]

Gettysburg Address in Old English

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:24:36 GMT

Another fun assignment in our Old English class:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse paraphrasing a famous speech from history or literature. Include at least four formulae and at least one hypermetric line.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry there are 4 beats ("lifts") per line, 2 in the first half-line (the A verse) and 2 in the second half-line (the B verse). Here's an example from a modern English rendering of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the half lines are separated with a caesura marked with ||.

The siege and assault || having ceased at Troy
as its blazing battlements || blackened to ash

But sometimes poets created "hypermetrical" lines that had more beats than this 2+2 convention, typically 3+2 or 3+3. As one source puts it, "No one knows what these changes in rhythm are meant to imply." Per our instructor, it seems that hypermetrical lines sometimes set off quotations and sometimes implied a kind of elevated thought. To state a couple of theories.

Anyway, a famous speech, you say? An easy choice is the Gettysburg Address (the original is below). Here's my rendering, which is not a line-for-line restatement, given the length[1] and that the assignment has us including formulae and whatnot.

Gefirn ūre fæderas on foldan forþbrohton
Long ago our fathers on earth brought forth [more]

Unlikely Anglo-Saxon heroes

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 10:55:47 GMT

This semester I'm taking a class in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry. In the class we read poems and learn about poetic techniques. That includes the mechanics (alliteration, meter) as well as the themes and styles that were favored by Anglo-Saxon poets.

We also compose our own poems! The assignment for our most recent class was this:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse likening a particular fictional character to a Germanic hero. The more incongruous the comparison, the better! Include at least 5 formulae.

A fun challenge. In addition to tending to the mechanics, there's this "formulae" thing. Poetry was an oral art in the old days; the formulae are quasi-stock phrases — things like þegnas æt þearfe ("thanes at the hour of need") and strang and stiþmod ("strong and resolute"). It seems that Anglo-Saxon poets would improvise poems and could throw in these formulae to keep the poem moving along. Our class keeps a hoard of these stock phrases, conveniently sortable by how they alliterate.

Students wrote some outstanding stuff: there were two (!) poems with Star Wars themes (people came up with Old English terms for "X-wing fighter" and "lightsaber"); one about Bugs Bunny, with the excellent twist that the hunter has a lisp (hawa instead of hara for "hare", i.e. "wabbit"); and a poem about Babe the Sheep-Pig.

I wrote about a beloved character who was about as un-warrior-like as I could imagine. I took the "not a strict limit" instruction to heart and ended up summarizing (sort of) an entire chapter of a well-known children's book. Here's the attempt:

[more]

It's literally figurative

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 11:01:28 GMT

I shouldn't follow social media discussions about language usage, because the chance of insightful commentary is ... small. But even knowing this, I did follow a thread in which people were complaining about the figurative use of the word literally, as in something like "I literally died laughing".

A couple of sample cites from that thread:

This is the one change of usage I find most distressing. "Literally" is a word we previously used to clarify whether someone was using a word literally or figuratively. However, now we end up in an infinite regress: "did you use literally to mean literally or figuratively?".... "I meant literally".... "and by that do you mean figuratively?"... "I mean literally".... "and by that do you mean figuratively?" etc etc

language should (and does) evolve. But when a word shifts from a specific and precise meaning to an ambiguous, inexact or contrary meaning, we have not improved our ability to understand each other.

Apparently some people don't know that the "figurative" sense is listed as a second meaning in many dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Oxford Learner's, Collins, and Cambridge. In fact, I'd be surprised to find a contemporary dictionary that doesn't include this sense. When I noted that M-W has this entry, one guy argued "not the OED and therefore not definitive".[1 [more]

Walking Lake Washington

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 14:19:36 GMT

As a fun walking project, I walked around Lake Washington. Not at all at once, of course — it's possible to walk the lake in one day, but that takes a special kind of person.[1]

I ended up walking around 65 miles. (I didn't track my mileage closely, but I walked between 7 and 15 miles for each segment.) I mostly followed the Lake Washington Loop, a well-known route for bicyclists, which is 50 miles. But I also deviated from the Loop in order to stay close to the lake and to, you know, check stuff out and to wander through neighborhoods that I don't really know.

I did the walk in six segments over a couple of weeks. I used public transport to get to and from the endpoints for each leg.

The 6 segments

Map

Photos

Randon observations

The 6 segments

North Seattle to Bothell (Lake City–Lake Forest Park–Kenmore–Bothell)

Bothell to south Kirkland (Bothell–Juanita–Kirkland)

Kirkland to south Bellevue (Clyde Hill–Bellevue–Beaux Arts Village)

Bellevue to south Seattle (Bellevue–Newcastle–Kennydale–Renton–Bryn Mawr–Rainier Beach)

South Seattle to UW (Rainier Beach–Seward Park–Madrona–Madison Park–Arboretum–UW)

UW to North Seattle (UW–Laurelhurst–Windermere–Magnuson Park–Lake City)

If you know the Seattle area, you might recognize that I got more ambitious with each leg.

Map

Here are some maps (taallll, sorry about that, but that's Lake Washington).

The numbers indicate photos. I don't have a detailed map of the route, oh well.

Lake Washington north

Lake Washington south

[more]

HTML images inline with text

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 10:20:22 GMT

Another quick post just for myself so I don't keep having to look things up. Today it's about displaying an image (for example, an icon) inline with text in a web page.

Here's the HTML for one way to do this:

<div> Inline text <img src="test_icon.png" style="margin:0;float:left;"> </div>

Notes:

The text and image are in a div element, with a span element for the text and an img element for the icon.

Both the span and image are set with float:left, which puts them on the same line.

The icon is pushed to the right of the text by setting the text width. Here, I use width:12ch; the ch unit is approximately the width of a character. The most important thing about the ch unit is that it's proportional to the current font size.

Margins for both the span and img elements are set to 0 so that the text and image are right next to each other.

The text and image are followed by an empty p element that has clear:both to reset the floating.

Obviously, the image has to be of a size to fit the line of text, but that's a different issue that can be solved by resizing the image.

In action:

There are a variety of approaches. Here are more ideas:

How to make image inline with text (Stack Overflow)
[more]

Idle reset for idiots

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 14:26:18 GMT

My first car was a 1968 VW Beetle. This was an honorable tradition in our family — my Oma drove a 1959 Beetle, and my mother had a 1973 "Super" Beetle. I am (was) a third-generation Bug owner.

Technologically, a '68 Beetle was trailing edge even in its day. Everything was mechanical; no fancy fuel injection, no electronic ignition, none of that. On the plus side, this retro-tech made it practical for an owner to do a lot of the maintenance themselves.
Being young, impecunious, curious, and naïve, I did just that. I got a copy of the venerable How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir.[1] I studied that book for hours and hours, learning to do oil changes and tuneups — there were many greasy fingerprints on my copy. I eventually graduated to the daunting task (see earlier: naïve) of rebuilding the engine, led carefully by Muir's steps and Peter Aschwanden's brilliant drawings.

Aschwanden's illustration of a Volkswagen's brake system

(The engine ran and took me all the way from Denver to Seattle, so my work and/or the step-by-step instruction was apparently good enough.)

[more]

AI versus anyone who knows a thing

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 10:37:08 GMT

Some fun ("fun") with AI today. To start, I saw this post on Bluesky:

Text:

its amazing how chatgpt knows everything about subjects I know nothing about, but is wrong like 40% of the time in things im an expert on. not going to think about this any further

The post is an AI repurposing of an observation about media accuracy. There are various names for this. One of them is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, which is an observation about "the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies" (Wikipedia).

Another name is Knoll's Law, which states that "everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge".

It's unclear whether the person who made the Bluesky post is deliberately echoing these laws, but I wouldn't be surprised. And it's funny, either way.

As a perfect bonus to all this, I couldn't remember the name of the law, so I did a Google search. And Google's AI response did not disappoint — it gave me the wrong information:

Text:

[more]

VBA tip: insert text at the start and end of a paragraph

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 20:00:23 GMT

A Word macro/VBA tip. I'm writing this up primarily because I do this just seldom enough that I look it up every time. At least now I'll now where to look.

Suppose you're writing a Microsoft Word macro (in VBA). You want to add text to beginning and end of the paragraph. In my case, I'm adding HTML tags around the paragraph content, which is why this is interesting to me.

The Paragraph object has a Range property that returns a Range object. The Range object in turn supports the InsertBefore and InsertAfter methods. So you'd think that you could do this:

Dim para as Paragraph Set para = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(1) para.Range.InsertBefore("") para.Range.InsertAfter("")

This almost works. However, the closing  tag is added after the paragraph as a new paragraph:

Instead, do this:

Dim para As Paragraph Set para = ActiveDocument.Paragraphs(1) para.Range.Select Selection.InsertBefore ("") Selection.MoveLeft unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend Selection.InsertAfter ("")

This is what's happening:

Use the Range.Select method to select the paragraph. This gives you access to a Selection object.
[more]

Slaughter-choosers and other "wæl" terms

Tue, 06 May 2025 10:58:14 GMT

Anyone who reads Old English poetry will soon enough encounter the word wæl, which means "slaughter". (There are a lot of fights in Old English poetry.) In poetic senses, it was also used for "battlefield" or sometimes metaphorically for those who had been slain in battle (hold that thought).

Naturally, there are compounds:

wælsceaft: "slaughter-shaft" = spear

wælstow: "slaughter-place" = battlefield

wælfus: "slaughter-eager" = ready for death

wældreore: "slaughter-gore" (dreore gave us "dreary", originally meaning "bloody; gory")

... and many more.

Ok. The word wæl died out in English, and we don't have any words today that directly descend from it. But the word also appeared in other Germanic languages, like Old Norse, which kindly lent us some words that are relatives of wæl.

One is Valhalla, the place in Norse mythology where slain heroes go. Although this concept wasn't widespread in Saxon thinking (apparently), you can see the etymological connection to wæl + hall, where wæl here refers to those who have been slain.

Another wæl-ish borrowing is Valkyrie, who are "maidens of Odin" (M-W) who conduct those slain heroes to Valhalla. The Norse/Germanic roots are again val, a relative of wæl, plus kyrie. The word kyrie is an inflection of the verb for "to choose" (ceosan in Old English).[1] So literally "slaughter-choosers".

That was in Old Norse mythology; whatever the Saxons might have believed about slaughter-choosers, [more]

In the "hood"

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 12:59:16 GMT

Old English had a word hād that meant "condition, state, character, nature, form". We don't have this word anymore, but the Old Englishers also used this word in a lot of compounds, some of which are still with us.

For example, they added hād to a number of ecclesiastical terms:

cirichād: order of the church ("churchhood")

munuchād: monastic state ("monkhood")

biscophād: bishopric ("bishophood")

One that we still have is prēosthad (priesthood).[1]

They used hād in a lot of terms that described the condition, state, character, nature, or form of people:

werhād: manhood

wīfhād: womanhood

cildhād: childhood

geogoþhād: youth ("youthhood")

ealdhād: old age ("oldhood")

cnihthād: boyhood, youth, (male) virginity[2]
hagosteadhād: bachelorhood

mægdenhād: (female) virginity, that is, maidenhood

You can see how hād was a useful term to cover concepts like these:

camphād: contest, war ("warhood")

gīslhād: being a hostage ("hostagehood")

þēowhād: service ("servicehoood")

druncenhād: drunkness ("drunkenhood")

A term that made me laugh was the term wǣpnedhād, which literally means "manhood". This (definitely attested) term was used to refer to a dude's "male sex", a usage we still see today.
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Halt, who turns there?

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 10:07:07 GMT

I saw a post on the social medias that asked something like "If I'm in a Turn Only lane already, do I need to have my blinker on?" It got me thinking about the whole question of when and why to use the blinkers (on your car, in case that's not clear).

I should start by noting that using the blinkers is a way of telling other people what your intention is. You, obviously, know where you intend to go.[1] The question of whether to use blinkers is therefore really one of whether it's useful for these other people to know your intentions.

The short answer: yes. In the most general case, your blinker tells the driver behind you[2] that you intend to do something besides continue going straight. (It also explains why you're stopped in the middle of a street.) It also tells drivers coming at you that you intend to turn, which might involve crossing their lane.

The I'm-in-the-Turn-Only-lane inquirer was probably thinking about these other people — the driver behind you and potentially drivers ahead of you. In most cases, traffic-flow markers probably make it clear to them what you intend to do, so why do you need a blinker?

Well, there are other people who aren't drivers who would also like to know your intention. One group is bicyclists, who are often squeezed into a lane to your side and whose bike lane might not in fact be a turn-only lane.

Another group is pedestrians, who might not even know that you're in a turn-only lane. The sorts of control signals that drivers have — right- or left-turn arrows on the traffic light, signs hanging above an intersection, and/or arrows on the pavement — are often invisible to someone standing on the curb. (See earlier photo.)

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