How about a short light post today, after getting heavy yesterday (I mean, Nazis, after all)? A few weeks ago, I wrote about a typical example of how ideas come to me, and make their way onto your screen. Usually ideas come to me like that, just based on my everyday encounters with language. When I start a post with something like The other day I was listening to the radio and I noticed how the presenter pronounced the word haberdashery, it’s usually true, and not some awkward way to introduce the topic. And sometimes I’ll start with something like The other day I was wondering about the etymology of the word hamster… because that’s the kind of thing I do when my mind has a moment to wander.
So usually, there’s not a long gap between when an idea comes to me, and when I write about it. Occasionally a vague idea will come to me, and it’ll swim around my head for a long time, occasionally coming to the front of my mind, then receding back again, until the angle I want to take in writing about it comes to me. In those cases of course, it’s handy to note down my idea in case I forget it. This also applies when I get different ideas in quick succession. So when something comes to me I usually make a note in the Ideas memo I have on my phone. For a long time this was actually a text message to myself, because that’s how I used to always record important information like passwords or PINs. Then one day I remembered that it’s 2017 and my phone has a memo app. It still took me a few weeks to bother copying everything over though. When an idea comes to me I type it in quite frantically, in case I forget it (which does happen), and I’m usually too preoccupied to bother putting it all in a memo instead.
This is how I primarily record my ideas, but I also have my Blog Ideas Word document on my laptop. Obviously it’s much handier to use my phone, but I’m still quite sentimental about my Word document. When I first began this blog, I also started the Blog Ideas document, putting in everything I could think of, and panicking that I’d only be able to think of a few ideas and give up the blog shortly after I started. Luckily I managed to come up with a few page’s worth, and after I started writing I kept adding to the document whenever an idea came to me, until I realised it made more sense to use the phone. I also used to delete ideas from the document after I’d written about them to keep it uncluttered, but as the ideas kept coming I stopped bothering. Anyway, without further ado, here, copied and pasted for your pleasure, are my two ideas documents:
Phone Memo
English literature, correcting grammar, blueberry smoke, patients, klomp, bilingual, read, word with same meaning, know, gravy train, cup of joe, cricket, spiral staircase,adjective is vrrb, millenial, umlaut, days, fire, reason why, recipe, anger, wonder, tar, sleepers, arguments, besides, cowed, history, savvy, supposably, speak of the devil, boonies fittest, an orgy of evidence, draw, sawhorse , gin rummy , fine, retire, mean, bonnet, black and white as names, mammy, hack, 20 20, afraid, thunk, presume, why learn a foreign language, sentence, belawted, possibility for/of, daybreak, orca misnomer , letters look, saying phone numbers, stationery, mixed conditions , gaslight , roaming; newfie, quieter, health and safety, keep, avuncular , scumbag, book covers, research , stop to buy , hero, superhero, phrasing , un-American , je me suis trompé , advertising, accent marks, grapefruit, have , search terms , cornish, bbc silly words, fix, mind, unknown words, space, bound, but and and, gay, thanks , something and anything , greatuncle, past , littlest hobo, verb patterns, bilingual, what I hate , sociopath , cry, genealogy, writing typing, Harry’s tiles , novel, bonefire, teeth paste , sound, red pill, possibility of, comparative , mistake and error , Italian, responsible , sentence, lying, say what you want, dog days, could care less, song meaning , a wrong, the tennisman and cyclisme , spitting image , learn and teach, throwback thursday, story, italics, trump takes the IELTS, Esperanto, into town, filets mignons, language as a secret code, commas then relative clauses , bananas, athletic bilbao, tourists in a foreign accent, nor, shibboleth, bold, rider, chocolate, pidgin English
Laptop Word Doc
Blog Ideas
Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EV-7X_-Vxc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJx9QpYugUI
deplane
autocorrect
Basque
moonquake
Bent
Subtle and doubt
Silent k
textspeak
parabens
dumb
kitchen
can animals talk
nevertheless
Galway Bay
sponsored posts
mistake and error
anthropomorphism
analogue
none
names with s
incel
work colleague
ladybird
ology or ography
anyway, besides
foreign teachers
Step in law
Circles
watch
data mining
meta blogging
plebs and chavs
confidence and supply
advertising
question tag
euphemisms
spin
mean
blunt and sharp
The Emergency
make and do
porn names
hero
by hook or by crook
denizen
simile and metaphor
arms
tv mistakes
belated
hate on
justify
disabuse
clickbait
how we talk online
teacher training
hanged
less and fewer
hope you’re ok
blancmange
blood and fire
hit hit hit
translation
Bloomsday thunk
Thank thunk
20/20
Irish writers
Conditionals
Simile and metaphor
been being
hoary
influencer
entrance
baby talk
teetotaller
hung
quarter
whom
taller than I
default
mongeese and mice
tennis
synecdoche
elbow grease
passive
sjw do gooder
mistake
bar
mate
five-dollar words
get as in understand
mugwumps
finger numbers
stereotypes of languages
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Dmqrn7_Q4
gravity
bucket list
peter out
banana republic
nitpick
parrot
alphabet
red herring
porn
instead
quarter
lemur
moot
inflammable
mugwump
butler
months and seasons
bargain bin
word stress
country names
bigly, wrongly, hardly
quintessential
canon
genre
curating content
fire walk with me
titles
cross
restaurant
ram
paradise
calque
nines
tit
poach
gone south/pear shaped/belly up/tits up
kettle of fish
gaol
brand new
toponym
wifi
boterham
let it be
peasant and villain
emergency
leopard
grand
great Britain
chicken kitchen
entree
football’s stadium
to
grand
gin tonic
laugh
cowabunga
yeah
hello
dye
geographical names
die
ego
emergency
the uninvited
carnival
basilisk
potboiler
anticlockwise
gotten
storm
the
ring
diminutive
puns
kiwi
googling
swag
stiletto
subjunctive
pseudoscience
pronouncing surnames
odd
eleven
Peter
turkey
I could care less
masculine
confusing words
come and go
wing it
intensive purposes
school/college/university
adbc
Luxembourg
Count
Disambiguation
pantomime
honeymoon
you’re welcome
Latin abbreviations
redundancy
winningest
déjà vu
dates
monsters
zed
robots and zombies
dank
initialism
hot verbs
the blues
red letter day
road street avenue
abbreviations
surnames
neologisms
feels
malapropisms
ambulance
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators
right
genre fiction
thorn
knock up
Cornish
hypernym
How to Disappear Completely
familiar
advice/advise
movie translations
I before e
Who(m)
curry and public house
beg the question
iain banks
banning sarcasm
heart
Orwellian
Homage to catalonia
Googling capitals
Dick
fall
author(ise)
history/story
euphamisms
campaign
clock
legend
division
milestone
Singe
Metalanguage
sombrero
Comic sans
Spider-man’s hyphen
Weasel words
Meme quotes
innit
Lost words
movie
Motherland
Pakistan
Using other national Englishes
Hamster
surnames
Okay
Overture
savvy
adaptation
Acoustic adaptation
thought
Welcome
Children’s learning
That
Pullman
Bury the hatchet
manslaughter
Georgeous
Rain
Country names
Break his duck
Mate
Bands and teams
Grading language
lynch
Business language
literally
How to get rid of your accent
English in other languages
Sorry
Oxford comma
none
Willy nilly
Duolingo
Shakespeare
Embiggens
Drinking the kool aid
cocktail
Like
Dog
Releases
Girl
Guys
Click
Borrow lend
Clickbait
Colours
uncanny
Football
Hashtag
Yes and no
Kick drink eat
Sample sentences
Everytime, anytime etc
Capitals
Comma with money
semicolon
revert
Vestigial words
TV teaching
French fries
Me fail English
What is grammar
irony
Mental masturbation
Whiskey in the Jar
Smash it/beat it
touristic
Most common words
Don’t
scapegoat
Literally
Cloch and fiacre
I’m loving it
Words for love
politics and the English language
orwell
Shakespeare
Dickens
What makes a good language teacher?
I amn’t
Distance
Directness
Apostrophe
Hyphens and dashes
Tenses
News language
Present perfect
Komedy k’s
Ye olde
Embarrassing pronunciations
Conditionality
George Orwell
(S)he
Olaf Stapledon
China Miéville
In the Penal Colony
How languages sound
You know what
A few quick notes: Clearly it’s a lot easier to space things nicely in Word. If you’re a somewhat regular reader, you might recognise some of these that made it to the screen. With others, you might not have a clue what they’re supposed to be about. With a few, I have no clue what they’re supposed to be about. Some of them I’ve already tried writing about, but couldn’t find an interesting angle, and gave up, so they’ll now only ever exist as ideas. And yes, some of them are typos (don’t bother googling belawted to see if it’s some obscure word with a fascinating etymology: it’s just meant to be belated, which is one of those swimming-around-my-head words I mentioned earlier).
Obviously these documents are reassuring resources, especially on the rare days when I want to write but don’t have anything particular in mind. Usually though, I don’t need to dip into these two for an idea, as I generally have something to the fore of my mind when I sit down to write. But, perhaps by perusing these two lists, you’re lucky to be getting a preview of some future posts, as well as a glimpse into my “creative” “process.” I bet you can’t wait for that post about none!
English-Language Thoughts 
I keep memos in my phone and also handwrite ideas in a notebook. And then sometimes the best ideas are just spontaneous ones!
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Absolutely, these days I’ll usually have something in mind, but then Trump will say something absurd for me to analyse. He just did it too late last night as I’d already almost finished writing this.
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I store my memos in the Keep app found in the android playstore because it syncs everything to my google account.. used to only use the memo apps but they never wanted to work properly so I lost everything when I purchased new phones 😦 It’s nice to get a look into other’s creative process though, it’s a nice feeling that I’m not alone when it comes to writing down ideas and keeping somewhat confusing lists of possible blog topics! — I also have a question; Have you ever done/thought about doing a post like syntax for dummies? I’m not sure if your English teaching goes to that extent, but the English course I took in Uni barely touched on it and I can’t make sense of it at all.
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Glad I’m not alone too 😊. Looking at syntax would be interesting actually. I haven’t done it yet, and we don’t tend to focus on it in English teaching. It’s important though, especially for people who speak languages with very different syntaxes. And it’s interesting for native speakers to learn about the basics of English too.
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Ah, I see! The course i took was “Advanced English grammar and language” so it dipped into syntax, phonetics and all that. It is important indeed! Sadly, I have no knowledge of syntax in my native language, never really had an interest in learning it either, I supposed it would have helped to have that knowledge first. But I do see the importance in learning the language itself before diving into a subject like that. 🙂
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I’d probably need to remind myself a little about the rules of English syntax before I wrote about it :).
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That was short?
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I just write my ideas down on paper when they come to me but usually means I find scraps of paper everywhere with random titles on haha.
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I don’t think I could do that: I’d lose most of them!
Though apparently you retain information better when you handwrite it, so at least I wouldn’t forget what the notes were supposed to be about!
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I’ve bought a planner in the hope it’ll help me a bit more! I just prefer hand writing my ideas for some reason
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That list will keep you going for a while! I am a spreadsheet fan, so both blogs have a spreadsheet with columns for the date, idea, and link when it’s published. I’ve filled in the title column for my beauty blog until the end of December, but my teaching one is more spontaneous because I get ideas from my classes or from things that I read or hear. I think the most important thing is to write the ideas down when we get them so that we don’t forget them – how we choose to do that will be different for everyone.
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Absolutely! I’d love to be organised enough to have a spreadsheet like that, but I wouldn’t keep it up to date, especially because of, as you said, all the spontaneous ideas that can come up.
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Banning sarcasm……
This is a nice little insight into your blogging mind. Just don’t forget to then read your memos.
I need to start getting some order somewhere, thank you for inspiring me 🙂
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I think I need to read mine every few days to help me remember what they mean!
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Ha!
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Goodness. I’ll have to finish reading this when I won’t be interrupted by needing to go to work 🙂
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They’re quite exhaustive indeed! And most of them will probably never even get to become a post :).
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I find using a mixture of using phone notes, laptop documents a d old school oen a paper best simply because im so forgetful and should one break or go missing i have backup. You’ve got a lot of ideas remember inspiration can strike anytime 😉
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It certainly can! It was interesting to look at my lists actually, as it made me realise how long it’s been since I’ve had to use them! Just keeping my eyes and ears open gives me lots of ideas 😊.
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I still use post it notes. Don’t even know where the memo or note thing a ma bob or is it thing a ma jig is on my phone. Happy to see chocolate made the list . I will be borrowing pear shaped. Yes siree! 😊
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Good luck with it 😊.
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Just reviewing your lists again… pear shaped was very inspiring, thank you … think I’ll go with rain… or …. hmmmm… Nope — can’t do much with break his duck?! What the heck! Perhaps chicken kitchen 🙂
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Ooh, chicken kitchen is a good one, I might do that soon 😊.
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That´s a god method, Niall… I also write notes on my tablet. I like to record them too, as audio messages to myself.
I guess there is always order amidst chaos… Or so they say… each one of us can only fully understand our own ideas, at least “in depth”, and that´s even more true when it comes to Creativity, as it entails a process somehow, chained ideas, perceptions and feelings.
Have a great day ❤ xx Best wishes.
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Audio messages are a great idea, I think the sound would help me remember what the memos refer to, and go into more detail (I’m a lazy note taker when writing!) I’m often amazed by other people’s notetaking systems and can’t imagine how they work, but there’s always a logic only that person can see 😊.
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…or the word fore (or four!)! Thank you for sharing your creative lists. I carry a small notebook with me everywhere I go and I’m so thankful when I come across my scribbles!
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A) I wish I had this many post ideas. They sounds fascinating.
B) I’m intrigued by what you could possibly be thinking about blueberry smoke!
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Thanks, hopefully they turn out interesting! I was curious about how they seem to be on the radio in Belgium a lot, and got me thinking about Anglophone bands who are bigger in other countries
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Oh! They’re a band! Haha.
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[…] a particularly fertile creative experience for me, but with one major downside: I can’t write the ideas down, and often forget them. I wondered the other day if there were a term for this phenomenon (like the […]
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20/20 turns up both times, but you use Brittish English. I suppose metrication hasn’t progressed that far there?
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Not so much here in Ireland anyway. I learned the metric system in school, and found it perfectly logical, but imperial measurements are still embedded in so much of our daily lives: pints, sports measurements, height/weight etc.
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Your last name should have suggested that to me. I keep forgetting it is there. NI is even more forgettable.
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