The Lemma of Infinite Formality

"For any statement, as trivial as it may be, there exists a finite set of more trivial statements, from which it can be derived."

How to write RTL in Gmail

This is useful for people who write right-to-left sometimes, as is done in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and other languages.
So far I only have a solution for Firefox users, but I strongly recommend the browser to anyone. If you don't like 'messing around' with the computer and refuse to use anything but Internet Explorer, you're probably beyond my help anyway. Wait for Google fix this themselves, or write in English.

So if you use Firefox, install the Clippings add-on from the Mozilla site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1347
It's a good add-on. I recommend learning the basics of it for other uses as well.

Now download the Clippings export file I made from http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=950ac357b5088b54d2db6fb9a8902bda
It contains two clippings - 'RTL embed' and 'RTL end'. Each clipping is a single control character, U+202B and U+202C respectively, which start and terminate a region of RTL directionality.
To import the file into Clippings, right click any text-box in Firefox, select Clippings > Organize Clippings, in the dialogue click Options > Import, and select the file.

Your setup is now done. To switch to RTL in Gmail (or any other text-box in Firefox), simply right click and select Clippings > RTL embed. In most web pages, starting a new paragraph or aligning the text to the left will terminate the RTL region, but if you want to terminate it yourself you can right click and select Clippings > RTL end.

I've also defined shortcuts for the clippings (which you can change), but the shortcuts only work while input mode is English (once you start typing in Hebrew, for example, you have to switch back to English to use the shortcuts). Press ctrl+alt+v to enter Clippings' shortcut mode, and then 'v' for embed or 'f' for end.

Enjoy.

Why I changed the way I spell my name

I get asked this a lot. In fact, almost every Israeli who knows me well enough to feel comfortable asking this, did. If you know many Israelis, you'd realise that this means anyone who knows me at all (and some who don't really know me).
So if you also asked me the same question, and instead of taking the time to explain myself again I just referred you here, please understand. I am really tired of answering this question again and again. So tired, I took the time to set up this FAQ.

So the reason I don't use 'Nir' anymore, although it's the standard way to write my Israeli name in English, is that it causes people to pronounce it wrong. It's a bit hard to explain in writing, so feel free to skip the next paragraph and go straight to the links.

The problem is that that letter 'i' rarely makes the sound we were taught it makes when we learnt the ABC in the fourth grade - the 'ea' or 'ee' or 'ie' sound (note to native English speakers: not everyone can tell the difference between the three). I'm not entirely sure about the rules here, but it's got to do with the rest of the letters in the word, and specifically in the case of 'Nir' the 'r' following the 'i' comes into play. Consider the way the 'i' sounds in 'first', 'birth' 'shirt'. This is the vowel most English speakers use when they try to pronounce 'Nir'.

And now for the fun part: have a listen to how Mirriam-Webster pronounces the following words. It should make my point very clear.
Birr
Fir
Sir
First
Dirt
Stir

If you want some more examples, you can try playing around with AT&T's Text-to-Speech demo.


So I decided to find a spelling that would cause English speakers to properly pronounce my name, or at least come close.
I've considered Near, Neer, Nier, Nere, Nyr and probably others. Near was the only one that I thought both English speakers and non English speakers would pronounce correctly, and didn't have undesired connotations (like Neer, which is too much like Leer for my liking).

If this explanation does not convince you, and you still think I'm making a mistake, please keep it to yourself. I am miles beyond being interested.
Thank you.