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Hmmm
Question: Suggestions on words or phrases that would be better served by using synonyms when searching for them?
Context: I'm writing another emergency post for L@L to be held until we need it, and I want to use examples that people would actually use, instead of the artificial ones I think up. :D
Examples: I'm talking about things like "teen smoking" vs. "adolescent tobacco use" (the latter will get you more scholarly sources), and "search engine strategies" vs. "how to use search engines" (the former is stuffed full of links to the Search Engine Strategies conference and utterly useless for finding actual strategies).
I was first thinking "fast weight loss" vs. "weight loss" because the former gets you get-skinny-quick schemes and the second gives you more useful links, but that's really more appropriate for a post on broadening your search, instead of synonyms.
Context: I'm writing another emergency post for L@L to be held until we need it, and I want to use examples that people would actually use, instead of the artificial ones I think up. :D
Examples: I'm talking about things like "teen smoking" vs. "adolescent tobacco use" (the latter will get you more scholarly sources), and "search engine strategies" vs. "how to use search engines" (the former is stuffed full of links to the Search Engine Strategies conference and utterly useless for finding actual strategies).
I was first thinking "fast weight loss" vs. "weight loss" because the former gets you get-skinny-quick schemes and the second gives you more useful links, but that's really more appropriate for a post on broadening your search, instead of synonyms.
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If that helps. :)
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I myself learned the hard way when on the Ref computer in the open that the place online that sells soap is villainess.NET and not villainess.COM. (Although I see now that villainess.com is no longer in business, so I wouldn't have had the problem if I searched today. I only had it up on the screen for a second before hitting the Back button, but I do recall a lot of bare skin and leather. XD)
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(And my initial impulse was to use "willy-nilly" instead "blithely", which I guess is just further evidence that my sense of humour is rather deeply questionable.)
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Also, I have seen you around my flist for quite some time and I have often been intrigued by your ideas and considered subscribing to your newsletter, but I've been reclusive while dealing with some personal issues for a concurrent quite some time.
Thanks to a recent CBT breakthrough (not that kind), I am now feeling less reclusive, so I checked out your userinfo for your friending policy, and based on our similar questionable senses of humour, preferred spelling of humour, several other mutual interests including but not limited to psych and BDSM, overlapping reading circles, posting infrequency, and appreciation of awesome Saiyuki icons, I have added you to my LJ reading list. Hi!
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(BTW I'm not ignoring yesterday's comment & email - I'm dealing with something else on L@L right now. :D)
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And no problem about taking your time with replies. As long as LJ and gmail are not eating notifications, I don't worry. It often takes me long enough to gather my thoughts together that I don't expect people who are actually, like, working! and blogging! and exercising! and accomplishing stuff!, to be speedy with their replies. ;) (Though if you actually forget to reply, don't count on me to remind you, as I tend to forget my own comments, too.)
Speaking of accomplishing stuff!, it is a sunny day here in Toronto and I am nearly out of tissues, and the world has been taunting Tav and I with cake for the past 24 hours (RuPaul's Drag Race most recent episode watched last night, and evidence of chocolate icing on several plates in Tav's work lunchroom today), so I'm off to the grocery store soon and may not be back before LJ goes offline for maintenance.
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(Although your comment below reminds me there's one other fair-warning FYI I need to add to the profile -- 99.9% of the time I don't do comment notifications, so if you comment on my posts or reply to one of my comments elsewhere, I might not notice it immediately, or ever, if it's in a conversation that's been inactive for a while. Feel free to ping me directly if you're hoping for a response on something that might have been missed.)
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When he told me about this, I had tears in my eyes from laughing.
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Pardon my inner eight-year-old, but I have to admit the first thought that came to mind is flatulence: "help i keep farting" vs "tips for dealing with excessive wind."
As I have had Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) since before the web existed, and have worked with co-workers and clients with digestive illnesses such as Crohn's in "let's compare our symptoms and trade tips" situations, I have figured out how to effectively search on this and related issues, and talk about details with embarrassment. I am, however, wryly amused at the range of terms, from 8-year-old crude slang to delicate euphemisms, that get used by those still searching for a diagnosis, and I sometimes wonder how many are out there who don't manage to find a relevant forum for their question at all!
Then again, maybe it would work better as an example in a "how do I research things I'm too embarrassed to ask a librarian for help with?" post. ;)
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Actually, a "how do I research things I'm too embarrassed to ask a librarian about" *is* a good topic for a post! Especially one that focuses on how to take a vague topic like "help i keep farting" and turn it into something that returns good information.
Come to think of it, might you be up for a guest post at some point about your search issues and how you solved them and tips you've figured out? Hearing about it from someone in the trenches, so to speak, may be useful for someone out there.
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Heh.
More seriously, thank you, I'm pleased that you think that well of my writing ability and that I would be up to the high standards of L@L. Alas, I'm afraid I'm not yet up to writing that sort of guest post -- not any time soon, my concentration and memory issues have not been good lately due to med side effects. (I keep thinking of L@L posts I could ask... while I'm in the shower or washing the dishes or something.)
And I now realize my previous comment quite misleading: I was officially diagnosed with IBS in 1998 (and discussed symptoms with less helpful doctors since about 1990), so I had picked up a lot of the "medical issue" style of terminology before I had the chance to do my own searches about it. And when I did search, it was usually about the more painful, gross, and debilitating digestive symptoms, where finding forum discussions where other people asked about "tooting" and "passing wind" was a side tangent to what I was actually looking for.
I am also very fortunate to be living in Canada where I never had to worry about the "expense" of going to the doctor when I felt I needed a professional opinion about my symptoms, and I was never afraid of going to the doctor (dentist: yes; doctor: no), so I was often looking to get better informed after discussing new options and concerns with my doctor -- which might not be the case for most of your readers.
That said, I will keep it in mind, and *next * time I find myself wanting to research a health-related or mildly-embarrassing issue, I will try to document my attempts, tactics, and results so I can try to build a post around it to offer.
In the meantime! I am guessing you did not get a reply notification of the recent comment I left to a months-old comment of yours on someone else's locked post, about a potential L@L topic. Yeah, I'm sorry, I know, I was brainfogged at the time. I am doing a bit better now; I will email you the link to your gmail, since I want to respect the privacy lock and so I didn't want to send it to the blog's email.
In the meantime also! Ever since Hypatia's first awesome post about the information cycle, and assessing sources, I have been threatening to voluntell
If you're actually interested in having guest posts from non-librarian/non-librarian-to-be, I just thought of another proposal: perhaps Tav-the-voluntold and I could also work on something together about where product marketing descriptions (for non-exclusive products) on eCommerce websites come from, and how to find more information about products than is given on retailer's websites -- because we've both worked as Product Content Specialists for the Canadian website of a large international retailer of office products, computer/tech, and furniture. (Hmm, we'd need to dig out our old confidentiality agreements to see how specific vs. hypothetical we could get, but we're likely also benefiting by having been out of it for a few years, as the company completely changed their database backend stuff from what we used, so any details of the limits we were working with are outdated examples, most of the products we researched and composed content for have been since been discontinued, and mostly we'd be referencing public live-on-the-web information that was not even in existence when we worked there, so has nothing to do with any confidentiality. (My run-on parenthetical sentence-writing ability: let me show you it.))