Hackpacker

In the corporate jungle there are few things as dangerous as the slow-moving HiPPO. The meeting is going fine until everyone turns and listens out for the confused charge of the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (or HiPPO).  After absently fidgeting with their Blackberry for most of the presentation, HiPPOs will typically yawn, “Yeah, we’re not doing any of that. What about building a MySpace page? Kids love that don’t they?” This is answered by howls of approval from the corporate hyenas. HiPPO decision making is becoming extinct as businesses are placing an emphasis on marketing research and what their customers actually want. In Hollywood, however, amphibious animals are still calling the shots with the announcement this month of – hold onto your balls - HungryHungry Hippos: The Movie . In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

There's been a lot of death knells sounded for the bookshop. And a few of the big chains have been in strife - Borders, Angus and Robertson were the big news. But an interesting rumination on the future of bookshops from the Association of University Presses got me thinking about how they could thrive. Rather than being defensive about online bookshops stealing business, the article suggests stealing clicks and mortar's ideas like showrooming. Bookshops are becoming the place where buyers encounter books but sneak home to buy them cheaply (or increasingly do it in store on their phones). Last Christmas in the US Amazon paid shoppers to report prices on their mobiles by promising discounts or cash then undercut physical bookstores on. There's no avoiding clicks and mortar in the physical world. So the article suggests bookshops are evolving into a "book place" offering book rental, secondhand options or membership models. It might even be possible to get a qu

Also becoming popular as a tattoo (image by Emily Lewis ) It’s not just words that go extinct, sometimes the symbols before or after them fall off the perch. Take the interrobang – not the sexual torture it sounds like but a handy combination of the exclamation mark and the question mark or ‽ . It was invented in 1962 to handle both alarming and questioning sentences, but despite getting a run on typewriters in the 1970s never really took off. It became defunctuation. The interrobang joins typographical oddities at the foggy end of the keyboard such as irony mark ؟ (a backward question mark invented in France and never seen in the USA) and asterism ⁂ (a triangle of three asterisks used to signal the end of a sub-chapter). Still, there is the hope of refunctuation as symbols get resurrected like the @ sign – once exclusively used by accountants for “at the rate of” before email jumpstarted its comeback.   In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment pag

It starts innocently enough with a birth announcement on Twitter, maybe an image of a new born on Facebook, then slides into a blog about your beautiful baby’s every poop (images included). If you’ve ever known more about a friend’s child’s bowel movements than their doctor then you’ve been a victim of oversharenting. The blog STFU Parents has become a watchdog for the worst offenders, pulling out cases like misspelled defences of homeschooling or opening up a Facebook page in honour of their precious child’s snot. They’ve even discovered new subtypes like mommyjacking , where an apparently innocent status like “I’m tired” becomes mommyjacked with comments like “You don’t know tired until you’ve had a teething baby screaming in your face at 3 AM!!!”. Child-free friends encountering this are officially allowed to respond by putting parents in a “timeout” in a bar somewhere. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

It sounds a little filthy, but this cheerful exclamation is just another word for awesome. The origin of amazeballs has been attributed to bitchy celeb blogger Perez Hilton who encouraged Twitter users to retweet it to make it a trending topic way back in 2009. Tim Burgess and his Amazeballs But the word (sometimes spelt amazballs) really jumped the shark in February 2012 when Tim Burgess of Brit indie band The Charlatans tweeted that he thought totes amazeballs would make a good breakfast cereal. Kellogg’s’ surreally took him at his word, producing a concoction of shortbread, raisins, marshmallows and chocolate-flavoured drops in a pack featuring a cartoon version of the singer. The sugared-up cereal should come with a pair of dentures in every box, though Burgess reckons it’s true to the word’s inspiration because it “sounded to me like something Willy Wonka would come up with.” In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page.