03 June 2013

Terms for (almost) everything

The Jargon Of Junk Food by Paul McFedries appeared in IEEE Spectrum on 31 May.
The Browser summarised it like this:
Manufactured foods need manufactured words. Food companies strive to increase stomach share by cranking up the pillar ingredients — salt, sugar, and fat — to a bliss point of overwhelming flavour. The optimal mouthfeel is a vanishing caloric density at which the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is fooled into thinking it’s hardly consuming any calories at all, so it just keeps snacking, or auto-eating.

The Mysteries Of The Cereal Box by Paul Lukas  appeared in  The New Republic on 28 May 2013. The Browser summarised it like this:

 Irresistible. A feature-length piece in a major publication on a taxonomy of cereal-box closure mechanisms, and their respective strengths and weaknesses. You never thought about it before. And now, every time you see a cereal box, you will say to yourself: “Aha! Slotted!” Or, “No! Slotless”. Conclusion: The slotless closure is by so much the better that it’s a mystery why any manufacturers still persist with the slotted.
Quote:
Surprisingly enough, the two versions of cereal closures don't have separate names, which is rather disappointing. You'd think the packaging industry would have come up with endearingly geeky terms for them, no? But no. So we'll keep calling them slotted and slotless, at least until someone comes up with something better. (my bold)

ChatGPT, a drafting aid for translation by emulation

On 17 October 2011, I published the first of two posts summarising my general approach to the type of translation/adaptation services I was ...