The New Uxbridge English Dictionary is now available for sale.

Following on from the very popular Uxbridge English dictionary, the new version offers a range of new words and an interesting take on their meaning.

Cursory; A place where children learn to swear

Mumps; Heaps of unwanted mothers

Halitosis; Bad breath brought on by a comet

Baccanalian; To bet on a martian

Chiropractise; To get ready for a trip to Egypt

Senile; What to do whilst in Egypt

Canape; Scottish inability to settle bills

Canneloni; Scottish refusal of your request for an Overdraft

Acne; A dyslexics walking stick

Warming; A Geordies chinese vase

Binmen; Post-op Transexuals

Groin; The ‘GO’ light in Birmingham

Thesauras; A disorder following consumption of curry

Amish; Similar to an Arm

Caesarian Section; Part of a salad

Navigate; Scandal involving road menders

at Amazon.co.uk

The Real Meaning of words - examples from original book

“You know..” There are many words which we use unnecessarily.

We use them subconsciously without realising:

• How frequently we use them
• How they add nothing to the conversation
• And how they can irritate people.
• How they can sound condescending

A common example is adding ‘you know’ to the start of sentences. ‘You know, people speak too much.’

Examples of Unnecessary Words

• Actually,
• I mean
• Well,

All these words can also convey a kind of condescension.

I am making a big effort to remove these unnecessary words. Speak less, say more. Silence is good.

Jeremy Paxman (University Challenge, BBC2): What is another name for “cherrypickers” and “cheesemongers”?

Contestant: Homosexuals.

Paxman: No. They’re regiments in the British Army who will be very upset with you.

Phil Wood (BBC Radio Manchester): What’s 11 squared?

Contestant: I don’t know.

Phil Wood: I’ll give you a clue. It’s two ones with a two in the middle.

Contestant: Is it five?

Answer: 121

Richard Madeley (Richard and Judy): On which street did Sherlock Holmes live?

Contestant: Er…

Richard: He makes bread.

Contestant: Er…

Richard: He makes cakes.

Contestant: Kipling Street?

Answer: Baker Street

Question (BRMB Radio): What religion was Guy Fawkes?

Contestant: Jewish.

Host: That’s close enough.

Answer: Roman Catholic

Steve Le Fevre (The Biggest Game in Town, ITV): What was signed to bring World War I to an end in 1918?

Contestant: Magna Carta?

Answer: Treaty of Versailles

Phil Wood (BBC GMR): What ‘K’ could be described as the Islamic Bible?

Contestant: Er…

Phil: It’s got two sylla-bles… Kor…

Contestant: Blimey?

Phil:Ha ha ha, no. The past participle of run…

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Contestant: Silence

Phil:Okay, try it another way. Today I run, yesterday I…

Contestant: Walked?

Answers: Koran&ran

Melanie Sykes (The Vault): What name is given to the condition where the sufferer can fall asleep at any time?

Contestant: Nostalgia.

Answer: Narcolepsy

Steve Wright (Radio 2): Johnny Weissmuller died on this day. Which jungles-winging character clad in a loin cloth did he play?

Contestant: Jesus.

Answer: Tarzan

Chris Searle (BBC Radio Bristol): In which European country is Mount Etna?

Contestant: Japan.

Chris: I did say European country… I can let you try again.

Contestant: Er… Mexico?

Answer: Italy

Paul Wappat (BBC Radio Newcastle): How long did the Six Day War between Egypt and Israel last?

Contestant: (long pause) 14 days.

Answer: Six days

Daryl Denham (Virgin Radio): In which country would you spend shekels?

Contestant: Holland?

Daryl: Try the next letter of the alphabet.

Contestant: Iceland? Ireland?

Daryl: It’s a bad line. Did you say Israel?

Contestant: No.

Answer: Israel

JAMIE THEAKSTON: Where is Cambridge University?

CONTESTANT: Geography isn’t my strong point

JAMIE THEAKSTON: There’s a clue in the title

CONTESTANT: Leicester?

LINCS FM DJ: Which is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world?

CONTESTANT Barcelona

LINCS FM DJ: I was really after the name of a country

CONTESTANT; I’m sorry, I don’t know the name of any countries in Spain

GWR FM DJ: What happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963?

CONTESTANT I don’t know, I wasn’t watching it then

ROCK FM PRESENTER: Name a film starring Bob Hoskins that is also the name of a famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci

CONTESTANT Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

BEACON RADIO DJ: What is the nationality of the Pope?

CONTESTANT I think I know that one. Is it Jewish?

BAMBER GASCOIGNE What was Gandhi’s first name?

CONTESTANT Goosey?

JAMES O’BRIEN, LBC: How many kings of England have been called Henry?

CONTESTANT Er, well, I know there was a Henry the Eighth.. er, er, three?

LOTTERY HOST: What is the world’s largest continent?

CONTESTANT The Pacific?

Apostrophes in street signs have been banned by a council because its staff spend too much time dealing with complaints about grammar.

From now on, no sign produced by Birmingham City Council will contain the punctuation mark.

Debates over whether Kings Norton really should be King’s - or even Kings’ - Norton may rage on, but they will be useless.

And nearby Druids Heath - which was never actually home to one, let alone many, druids - will never take on the possessive, no matter how furious local apostrophe advocates become.

The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names should ever take an apostrophe.

However the decision was described as “absolute defeatism” by John Richards, the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

from: Telegraph

The simplest is when an apostrophe replaces a letter

• It is = It’s.
• I am = I’m

Singular Possessive.

An Apostrophe is used to indicate possession.

• E.g. Richard’s computer. (the computer belonging to Richard)

Singular Possessive ending in s

• Socrates’ discourses (the teachings of Socrates)

Plural Possessive

If many people are involved we put the apostrophe at the end

• The nurses’ uniform (the uniform belonging to the many nurses.)

Google’s grip on the internet seems to take on far reaching proportions, there seems to be no area that Google don’t seek to dominate.

Recently, they bough Feedburner. Last week, there was a notice that we would have to swtich over to Google Feedburner, so I made the switch. In the process, I seemed to lose about 40% of my hard won readers. On some blogs it was more than 50%.

• 8 Effective ways to increase RSS readership

Before upgrading wordpress, it is always advisable to save a copy of your mysql database.

1. An easy way is to install WP automatica database backup - this saves going into phpMyadmin. Once installed just click link and backup a copy of database to computer. It can be uninstalled after backing up a database.
2. Wordpress automatic upgrade Just install and follow simple instructions. It has worked fine for me.

Improve Performance of Wordpress

• WP-cache Install and then activate. you can increase the expiration time from 3600 to 9993600 to make it more static.
• WP-Super Cache offers even better performance making pages static. It requires rewriting .htaccess. Though if the file is writable it will do it automatically. Wp-super cache also enables you to just run ordinary wp-cache

Virtual Private Server is like a private server because you have guaranteed a minimum amount of disc space and CPU usage. The advantage is that you are not at the mercy of other sites on a shared hosting company. You can also often have more CPU usage an. However, Virtual Private servers can have their own problems, especially if you don’t get a managed VPS.

vHost didn’t work well. The server crashed twice in our first 30 days so we got our money back. Though someone else said it has performed well.

Dreamhost VPS. This is quite easy to use and you can select how much CPU use and mysql database you want to buy. When I tried it, the VPS was very new and my sever kept going down and manually needed restarting by me. The effect was that I had far more down time than on shared hosting. Fortunately, I was able to move back to shared hosting. This problem may have been resolved by now, though.

Hostican VPS. So far so good. For VPS, we recommend choosing managed VPS, it is more expensive; I know some who had problems with DNS on a non managed Hostican VPS.

This is the 3 hosts we have tried. But, I’m still looking for a reliable, good value private server with high resource availability

Shared hosting is really cheap. I have 4 shared hosting accounts. If I get trouble on one account, I can move important sites. This is also a good way to back up a site, by having files stored on 2 servers.

Shared hosting offer unlimited domains and unlimited bandwidth. But, this is completely misleading. The issue is CPU use. They can block your account for excess CPU usage. So don’t put too many sites on one shared hosting. In particular it is mysql databases, scripts and other applicants which are heavy on using mysql.

I recommend using wp cache Super - This can make a site effectively static and reduce CPU usage significantly. - I’m still working on what optimal settings for WP-cache are. Would appreciate any comments in this regard.
At the very least use WP-cache and increase the expiry time from 3600 seconds to 99936000 seconds. WP-cache is slightly easier as it doesn’t involve rewritting .htaccess

Fantastico?

Initially I wanted fantastico because it makes it easy to install wordpress - you just click a button to install and upgrade. However, people tell me fantastico is no Good and can lead to problems. It is actually not necessary to have fantastico and wordpress is quite easy to install. Definitely don’t use fantastico for installing drupal.

I recommend this plugin - for automatic upgrades - this really saves a lot of trouble. See also Wordpress backups for manual backups

Automatic Backups. A great advantage of Dreamhost is that they are always doing automatic backups of your mysql databases and you can easily access a database from 12  hours ago or 2 days ago.

However, if you don’t use dreamhost. This is a useful plugin, - wp database backup - you can use it for one off backups or you can automatically order monthly / weekly backups

• Streamline. Reliable and relatively fast. Bulk User is £79.99. For this you can host 10 domains with 10 mysql databases.It has no fantastico for easy install and backup of wordpress. However, with the right wordpress plugins this is not a worry. Support is not particularly helpful. But, if you know what you are doing, it is a good service.
• Hostican. Reliable and good uptime performance. They offer ‘unmetered bandwidth’ and unlimited domains. But, like most shared hosting this is misleading. You can soon start getting ‘abuse notices’ for usuing too much CPU power. I have an account with 6-7 small wordpress blogs, but, started getting these problems after 12 months. Hostican seem to have the lowest threshold of CPU use for shared hosting. They say if you exceed 20 then it automatically closes your account for 5 minutes. - They don’t always tell you which is annoying because it is hard to know when you have exceeded the quota. This has put me off hostican, even though otherwise they have offered good performance.
• Dreamhost. Not without some problems. But, uptime is pretty good for shared hosting. Dreamhost help are very helpful. They solved a few wordpress bugs / issues, which I couldn’t work out. This kind of support I have not had anywhere else, not even with some managed VPS. Dreamhost also seem to allow much greater CPU usage than hostican. Disk space and bandwidth are more than you could use. I keep waiting to receive notices about exceeding CPU usage, but, haven’t had any yet.

Some have said that his experience of dreamhost shared hosting was it was very slow for wordpress. I have not found this on my account. - It may depend on which server you get lumped. But, it shows that shared hosting is always something of a lottery, and high performance can not be guaranteed.

I’ve entered Daily Blog Tips blogging idol 2. This time the competition is to try and get more subscribers, with voting for most effective strategies.

RSS numbers have been increasing well for Economics Help, I’ve had 40 new subscribers since start of competition (for some reason blog is at bottom of scoreboard, but, I’m sure that will be fixed.

By the way, out of 485 subscribers 300 are via email.

Today I am going to try experiment with a direct email box on the top of the sidebar (rather than just link to an email form). If this increases conversion rate I will let you know.