Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I was scrolling through Matt Cutts’ blog, where I saw this entry about how to make your own favicon. I knew how to make a favicon for a few years now, but I since I was scrolling through (just to get the author’s style, etc) I read it. One sentence got my attention (see in bold, the second one is for the context):

That’s two dashes before the “color.” Silly Wordpress converts it to a single long dash.

Being a non-native English speaker, I was amazed at that very moment. You see, most of my non-native English speaking friends, myself included, would’ve wrote “Stupid Wordpress”, not “Silly Wordpress”. Although both words are well known and are in active vocabulary.

And I was amazed by the difference that is made with just one word. In both cases, there is a complain towards Wordpress. But using “stupid” instead of “silly” suddenly makes it all heavy, rude, and accusative. “Silly” on the other hand is a much lighter version.

I’ll try to use “silly” instead of “stupid” from now on.