Glass Houses

My verbification of the colour red in this post caught the critical eye of Baz who wrote:

Your slipping Cassini, double d in redding !

"My slipping what?", I thought, as I pondered that comment, (the double-D reference side-tracked my mind for a moment) before realising that English language expert Professor Baz had, rather deliciously, fallen victim to Muphry's law, which states:

"If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written"

As Ducky McDuckface (above) observes, it's hard to take someone seriously when they don't know the difference between "your" and "you're".

No names, (it wasn't James), but in the past week we saw these examples from a regular blogger:

Because the reality is your probably going to lose the first one.

Oh dear. It wasn't just a one-off mistake either - the final line of the post was this:

Take you’re time!

Here's a helpful guide:

How apostrophes and the words "their, there and they're" are used, or often abused, is also a useful guide to how seriously to take someone.

Moving on, and I'm not sure a word for locking in a loss on all outcomes exists yet, or at least is in common use. While there are plenty of references to 'greening up' to be found - in guides to Betfair trading for example - the optimistic message in such writings (everybody always wins) appears not to want to consider, and thus doesn't mention, the possibility of locking in a negative outcome.

There was much debate in the early days of exchanges about whether a bet was 'laid' or 'layed' but I think the latter has over time become the accepted word.

I wasn't the only one to notice Baz's faux pas. James (he of Betfair Pro Trader fame) commented:

@Baz - Not to mention 're in you're. ;)
@Cassini - I always try to be positive.

As I (not James) wrote almost three years ago on being positive:

The other thing is that successful people tend to be more positive. You could argue that it's a lot easier to be positive when you have achieved some success, however modest, but I think that earned success (as opposed to winning the lottery for example) is often the result of a positive attitude rather than the cause.

I'm not sure I understand fully the negative attitude that so many people seem to have towards others who manage to be relatively successful.

Envy is obviously part of it, (I am a little envious of Ian's £1.4million for example), but I would rather use that envy in a positive way, a benchmark for what can be achieved, and as an incentive to keep moving forward and improving my strategies, than use it in a negative way, by spending hours writing comments suggesting the numbers are made up, that Elo ratings don't work, that workshops are a waste of time etc.

Not picking on Danny specifically, since there are many others like him, but I think that until your attitude changes from negative to positive, you will never have the mindset needed to be successful.

Even Jordan Spieth has admitted as much this week:

I just need to do a little bit better job of being positive with myself and smiling a bit more, having a bit more fun.