DMS

In the Midwest, the dandelions have already gone to seed, their fluff floating across the areas where a week earlier the flowers stood tall and bright and yellow, like lions with perfectly arranged manes. Dandy lions. Are there traces of lion or dandy in the dandelion’s name? Yes and no.

I’ve made my peace with the functions of the Ribbon in Word 2007 and 2010 (and 2011 in Word for Mac), but there’s still something about it that irks me: It takes up too much space.*

If you want to reclaim some vertical real estate in Word (or any of the MS Office programs), I have good news for you. The disappearing-Ribbon trick is super easy.

The Herald-Mail is seeking an editor to lead its night newsroom in Hagerstown, Maryland. Hagerstown has a growing population of about 40,000 and is 75 miles northwest of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The Herald-Mail is a daily paper that began in 1873 and has been owned by Schurz Communications since 1960.

In a review on Today’s Author, writer and sometimes editor Tony Noland reminded me of copyediting software I was going to check out. I’m not sure when I first encountered it (likely when the latest edition was released in July of 2012), but I remember thinking that the name alone was brazen enough to piqued my curiosity.

muse, verb: “to reflect, to be absorbed in thought” (mid-14th century); “to ponder, dream, wonder; loiter, waste time” (12th-century Old French)

Writing usually starts with a little musing. Pursuing that musing too far, however, can turn the writer from reflecting to wasting time. That calls to mind a different word. 

Admittedly, it takes very little to make me excited about vocab, but every once in a while something truly interesting pops up to remind me just how much I love the richness that can be found in a single word. Today, that something was the announcement of a photo contest on Merriam-Webster's website.

According to a worldwide 2012 Reuters poll, 20 percent of workers telecommute, with 10 percent working from home every day. In the June 2012 Monthly Labor Review [pdf], Mary Noonan and Jennifer Glass cite data sources showing that 30 to 40 percent of managerial/professionals and college graduates were working from home by the mid-2000s.

We’ve given you the basics, we’ve talked about participating in Twitter chats, and we’ve helped you learn the lingo. If you’ve jumped in and have found the interesting, helpful, tweet-prolific community of editors and others on Twitter, you might be wondering how to better filter and organize the experience. It’s time to tame the tweets.

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Copyeditors and other creative types and word-workers were surprised by recent developments with two online resources: Adobe’s entire line of Creative Suite (CS), now Creative Cloud (CC), software and The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE).

Adobe CC

In the early 1900s, Anna Jarvis campaigned to make Mother’s Day an official holiday because she wanted to honor her mother after she had passed away and thought others should honor their mothers, present or passed. Anna’s mother, Ann Jarvis, founded Mothers’ Day Work Clubs that focused on sanitation. Anna’s petition was finally successful in 1914 when President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a national holiday.