Why You Shouldn't Use Foreign Terms You Don't Really Know

From an article on GM's woes....

General Motors has experience shedding divisions, and shut down the Oldsmobile brand in 2001. Plenty of Oldsmobiles are still on the road today, and continue to receive service through GM dealers and the independent aftermarket industry. Likewise, when Ford bid alvederzane to their German Merkur brand or when Chrysler furled the sails on Plymouth,...

Emphasis added.

Okay, trying to throw in some German when referring to a German brand is understandable. But next time, would it be possible to get it proofread by someone who actually knows German? I'm not sure I could spell Auf Wiedersehen correctly without looking it up, but I could certainly come closer than that...

(And I didn't look it up, and I may have misspelled it...but I still came closer than the supposed pro....)

Update Mar. 29: It's been fixed.

A Useful Rule of Thumb

From John A. over at AmericaBlog:

If you're emailing it to one person, what you're sending is probably good. If you're emailing it to 5 or more people, it's probably crap.

That about matches up with my experience.

Oh, Snap!

There's an outraged op-ed in the Times today from an offended trader at AIG financial products, angry at getting tarred with the same brush as the people who brought down the company.

And then there's Andrew Leonard's point:

DeSantis received a bonus payment on March 16 of $742,006.40. But he's going to donate all the after-tax proceeds to charity, and he can do that because "I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust."

If you are in a position to donate more than half a million to charity and your family finances are still secure enough during one of the worst recessions in American history that you can blithely quit your job, then you are sitting squarely within the most privileged sector of U.S. society. You are still living a life that is out of reach to the vast majority of Americans.

And I just don't think most people will care how betrayed you feel.

Exactly.