In Canada, where i hail from, the term "brilliant" is gnerally reserved for truly outstandingly genius-like demonstrations of talent, intelligence, wit - whatever. It's not a term you hear often. If someone says "that was brilliant" or "she is brilliant" it's pretty much the highest degree complement with respect to intelligence or excellence one can achieve.
Not so in Britain (not prepared to generalize to the UK yet...).
In Britain, everything and anything can be "brilliant." Brilliant seems to be used in a way very similarly to the way "excellent" is used in most parts of North America. The one difference between the interchangeability of brilliant/excellent is the rather ironic way that brilliant can be used in the uk to indicate its opposite: you'll hear "oh that's just brilliant, isn't it" when something's really "a complete cock up" (to use another great brit'ism).
You'd rarely find a Canadian saying "oh that's just excellent" when it's a disaster. "That's just great...just great" is more common when going for reversal.
So if you're in the UK and someone says something you've done is "brilliant" - it's still a compliment, but it's just not as hot as you think were that epithet to be used back home. Alas.
Another expression that seems to have no Canadian equivalent is "bless 'em" or "lord bless 'em" or more simply "bless"
It's been harder to get a handle on when and how this particular expression gets used, but it seems to have something to do with covering one's ass after offering a critique of a person. Someone might say something to the effect of "he's not the sharpest tool in the shed" and follow this immediately with "bless him." The desired effect of the apostrophe "bless him" seems to be to mitigate the perceived harshness of the critique - so much to say "doesn't mean i don't like him or that he's not in other ways a nice person, no doubt."
The above interpretation is just deduction on my part based on the contexts of hearing the expression, and also the cultural context of observing the british reluctance (relative to canadians) of saying anything critical of anyone or anything.
This could well lead into an observation on canadian/british behaviour rather than word usage, but it's interesting to see how the two might be related.
It's just these small kinds of differences between english word usage that is part of the culture shock a person coming from Canada experiences when hitting the UK: the word differences become clues to deeper cultural differences that are more challenging to decode, because it's not a case of equivalences like "biscuit" in britain means "cookie" in Canada; it's a case of differences where there aren't parallels between the two places. So it sounds the same, but it isn't the same.
Even being in Britain for a few years now, i don't know how to interpret all the differences, but am better at recognizing them, and the recognition at least allows more comfort; less disorientation. I'll have to think of some examples anon.
Who'd a thunk it, eh? that two such supposedly historically close nations would have these, what would you call them, gaps in connection? I'm not sure what it's like for Brits going the other way, from here to Canada, if there's the same sort of sense of slight twilight zone off set. I have the impression of Canadians being so exposed, our heart, thoughts, everything on our sleeves, without being boisterous about it, that there'd be no difficulty getting a read on Canadian customs, practices and rationales for same. huh.
Mind you, try asking a Westerner why a Quebec'er may be a "separatist" and you'll soon see that we're not always so clear about our own culture(s), either...bless us.
A colleague of mine, Jeremy Cooperstock, has a rigorous email policy: once a day, and that's it. His emails always include a link to this policy so that folks know where they stand. That's polite (Canadian, eh?). But why have such an explicit policy?
There's an implicit, cultural expectation of immediacy with email: it can be sent and received at near light speed; a response should be just as rapid, so the logic seems to go. If one does not abide by these expectations, an explanation needs to be proffered. Hence an email policy. Based on Jeremy's example, i offer this note as a first draft of an evolving policy.
I'm pulling back from email. It's getting to be too much. Maybe you see this too: email, combined with a laptop and wireless, seems to have become the great distractor: i sit in talks and conferences and watch my colleagues and myself "multitask" - doing email while the speaker attempts to be more engaging than the current virtual exchange. There's nothing inherently wrong with these capacities, but i'm noticing that there does seem to be something problematic with my own practice of them: too much response mode to email rather than to the bigger picture.
So, over the next month at least, i'll be limiting my email reading to one or two set periods in the day, during the week, and likely zero on the weekend. As a result, replies to emails will likely be more like within a day or so, rather than an hour or so.
The reason for setting these limits is to reclaim my day from the reactiveness that is email. I find myself in open response mode - Pavlov's dogs come to mind: the email chimes and i respond. This can't be right.
Indeed, i know from experience that pulling away from email can be a positive, effective thing. My laptop keeled over last year, and had to go to warranty repair land. I remember the look of sympathy and horror that came over my colleagues' faces when i told them my laptop was in the shop - sympathy that this must be a terrible experience; horror at the thought of how awful that would be if it happened to them. I took the time as an opportunity to see what life without constant access to email would be like.
For what ended up being six weeks last year, i reclaimed my space from email and my world became a more relaxed, more effective place. Rather than have email on all the time while at work, i had it on twice a day only. I did other tasks the rest of the time. Things got done; things got finished; i went home at the end of the day and was home, not online. It felt great. Liberating.
And then i got my laptop back, and my resolve began to slide.
I've hung onto not doing email at night: that's family time, not work time. But now i find myself back to checking email first thing in the morning (and throughout the day) - with the idea that i will understand the shape of the day to come if i understand what emails i need to address. This is ridiculous, no? Email in my life is more often than not small things: confirming this thing; forwarding that file; setting up that date. These are not unimportant; indeed, they can be critical building blocks for projects. But here, too, i note that when they get to urgent mode of requiring several iterations back and forth in a day, or in an afternoon, or within the hour, that more often than not it's because i've let them slide, build up, so that they go from a reasonable thing that could have been dealt with calmly in advance to something that must be addressed "right now!" oh no! - i must be online to deal with this now now now - now how did that happen?
To gage days this way is too reminiscent of Prufrock's coffee spoons. It suggests that the big picture may be slipping out of focus, behind a flurry of to do's.
"So what is the big picture?" i ask myself. What are the big things, the mission level things, i want to accomplish? What are the big pieces that support that picture? and what are the things which need doing to support those pieces? Those things first.
In the 7 habits of Highly Effective People, in the section called Habit 3, First things First, Stephen R. Covey writes " 'The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.'
Where does email fit into that? When does email fit into that?
Over the next month, i'm hoping to rediscover this.
Like most folks, i get a ton of email. I get a ton of attachments with email. And those attachments are evil. For the most parts they have only generic names like "my assignment" or "Job Application" or "invoice". The mail client will add a number to the name so that one file doesn't overwrite another, but that's for the file system's benefit, not mine, the human being trying to make sense of these files without having to come through associated emails.
So whose problem is this? people's for not using more descriptive name identifiers?
I blame the System.
But to be proactive, we suggest alternatives...
It's not right to ask people to who have some kind of file template to come up with nice rich file names - especially when some folks are still getting over the legacy of 8char file names plus three character extensions.
But those days of short file names are G O N E.
So we need file systems to step up to the plate and help name these suckers in meaningful ways. There's lots of simple stuff a file system could do: it could automatically prepend all files with a user id; it could develop a bunch of project codes/names that a person could use (like course numbers or business names) for specific files, and have defaults set up which a person only changes as they need - if the system can't determine the context from other cues in the data itself.
With more operating systems deploying technologies for rapid content indexing, such reading of documents for labeling cues isn't that unlikely.
Simple selections with well chosen defaults could take a load of effort of people for creating reasonable labels for files both for their own later retrieval and for sharing. These same file names could be decoded on the recipient end for multiple categorization of these resources, too. So i could say for instance "show me all the files associated with comp6012 from Alistair" without having to reef through file folders.
I know this kind of listing is just what Apple's Spotlight is aiming at in OSX Tiger due out April 15, but index retrievals alone are not enough. we still like to be able to look at where things are in relation to other things, so we need to make these labels apparent to us, not just derivable by the system.
In the myTea project, we're looking at this kind of approach of assistive file naming for bioinformaticians (see the short paper on this), whose biggest challenge it turns out is not coming up with new insights into genes, but is managing the hundreds of files they get on their desktop which are generated by the various Web processes they run.
We can do this. And more than just improve personal data, we can get that data into sharable forms which makes it feasible for people to share the parts of their work they wish to share with the world or subsets of the world, where this information is meaningful. Community. We can do this. It's time to be liberated from the file systems and provide interaction that frees us from naming files and lets us get on with what we want to do: have fun, create knowledge, share.
One uses "among" when something occurs involving more than 2 people, and between for stuff involving two people. Right?
Hence, one would think that the sentence, "the objective of the workshop is to facilitate discussions between atendees," is grammatically incorrect: shouldn't the phrase be "discussions among antendees" since there will, one hopes, be more than two souls at the workshop?
But no! there are a few exceptions to this rule!
The Dr. Grammar Frequently Asked Questions page
summarizes the exceptions thus, siting other rhetorical sources:
If more than two are involved in a united situation, between is used: 'Between the four of us, we raised a thousand dollars.' If a comparison or an opposition is involved, between is used: 'There was great rivalry between the three colleges. It was difficult to choose between them.'" (Parle-Craig, Ruth, and Vincent Hooper. Barron's 1001 Pitfalls in English Grammar 70)
How bout that, eh?