29th October 2019
My brother used to call me a reptile. He’d looked up ‘psoriasis’ in the dictionary and found ‘a skin disease producing scales’. That sort of description is like gold dust to a young boy keen to insult his little sister. I retaliated by calling him ‘Borbis’, or ‘Borb’ for short. This made-up name annoyed him no end, but I think it was pretty kind of me to tease him with a word completely unrelated to his health complaints.
Differences are ...
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23rd September 2019
In July the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Sri Lanka had eliminated measles. The country’s last indigenous case was over three years ago, which means, apart from the occasional imported case, it is now officially free of the disease. It’s great news for Sri Lanka, but it makes me wonder – why is Europe lagging behind?
In the first five months of this year alone, Europe reported over 80,000 measles cases and 31 measles-related deaths. It’s a huge ...
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1st August 2019
I was surprised recently when a client sent me an email that read ‘πππ’.
Don’t get me wrong: I love an emoji as much as the next person. But in a professional email about submitting a manuscript?
According to Emojipedia , ‘face with tears of joy’ is widely used to show something is funny or pleasing. (Interestingly, it was also Oxford Dictionaries 2015 word of the year .) Great, my client was very pleased/amused with me! But how should I respond? π ...
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