I spent a couple of years living in Cambridge, England where I learned to speak British English and quickly came to realize Americans speak an entirely different dialect. I came to enjoy noting language differences and sharing my discoveries with my supervisor at work, Dr Andrew Lacey (the Brits don’t use periods or “full stops”… Continue Reading Idioms Away and Dialect Demagoguery!
I’ve become pretty familiar with phone trees since I started providing phone captioning services for people with hearing disabilities. This service is provided free from the Federal government through phone service taxes. But many of its users struggle with automated answering tools businesses use to reduce the number of live customer service agents. Here in… Continue Reading Falling Off the Phone Tree
How often do you read the fine print when you sign up for a new membership, open an account, or subscribe to a newsletter? Unless there’s a credit card involved, I don’t even skim the fine print. And if there’s a lot of fine print, I cancel out. But what do you do if you… Continue Reading When You Can’t See The Fine Print
My new-ish smartphone started prompting me a couple of weeks ago to install WiFi calling. Since we’re still getting acquainted, I’d lose the notice as soon as I tapped in my PIN and I’d get sidetracked by something else. But then the prompt remained visible and I went through the brief process of installing WiFi… Continue Reading WiFi Calling To The Faraway Towns
For the past several months I’ve been providing captioning services for people who are hard of hearing and use one of those caption phones that let them read their conversations. Many customers are older people who also use hearing aids. I’ve written about how people are speaking faster than ever before, which makes conversation harder… Continue Reading The State of the Spoken Langauge