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January 2010
Vol. 2 No. 1

Hi folks,

Welcome to wordFitness, the monthly eZine from The Word Gym. First of all, we’d like to wish you a very happy, healthy, prosperous and peaceful 2010!

2010 is a milestone for The Word Gym, as we celebrate our 20th birthday this month. Yes, the company was founded in January 1990, when the Amstrad PC-1512 was still at the cutting edge of consumer computing, fax machines were still pretty cool, and the French still used Minitel. Plenty of water has rolled under the bridge since then, and this anniversary gives us an opportunity to reflect on how the world of words has changed over the past two decades.

Feel free to add your comments to the following timeline – the pace of change over the past 20 years has been amazing, and I’m sure we all have favourite memories it would be nice to share.

Meanwhile, we wish you all good things in 2010.

Lois

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As copywriters, we are very aware of the many everyday words that have become debased by overuse, inappropriate use or actual abuse. But even copywriters are occasionally surprised by an especially blatant example of linguistic aberration. Such as the ones I met over the New Year period…

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December 2009
Vol. 1 No. 1

Hi folks,

Welcome to wordFitness, the new monthly eZine from The Word Gym. We thought the start of the festive season would be an ideal time to launch!

Writing an eZine full of interesting news on our activities is tricky, because so much of what we do is highly confidential. We’re always working on projects for brand-new products and services that haven’t been launched yet! Maybe we’re writing copy for a B2B campaign by a major software developer, or translating ads for a B2C food and drink retailer, or tailoring eDM copy for a major energy company: whatever it is, it’s all leading-edge stuff that we can’t put in a newsletter under any circumstances.

But we’ve been working in this specialist field for 20 years, so we do have a few entertaining things to say about copy in English and other languages. Entertaining and, we hope, genuinely useful. Your comments, if you choose to make any, will also be useful.

Have a brilliant Christmas, and we’ll be in touch in the New Year!

Lois

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Oh that Steve Jobs, he is a one! After all the excited conjecture about an “Apple Tablet” earlier this year, then the relatively low-key new product launches in September, he manages to catch the press completely flat-footed with a number of really impressive product launches timed to – aha! – “coincide” with Microsoft’s launch of Windows 7.

Really impressive? ‘What’, I hear you say, ‘you mean a couple of iMac upgrades, a new MacBook and a fancy mouse? I think not!’

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I’ve been meaning to write about this little wonder for a while now. DFM2HTML is a very unusual web editor. Yes, it’s WYSIWYG (sort of), but it’s much, much more powerful than most WYSIWYG editors. Why? Because the concept of “nesting” is used throughout – every aspect of the program is governed by this CSS/XML concept, which makes it both exceptionally flexible and (occasionally) irritatingly quirky. But the flexibility vastly outweighs the quirks, especially in the latest version, 3.5.

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I was struck by a concatenation of thoughts yesterday (honestly!). I had just finished reading a summary of Karl Popper’s thought (the greatest scientific philosopher ever, in my ‘umble opinion; a balanced synopsis appears here, with useful links to other sites), I’d just seen an article on psychological research into the basis for neurolinguistic programming (again, good summary in Wikipedia), and I was watching the dog dreaming on the sofa.

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