Remember a few years back that a pair of human spell-checkers made the news for traipsing around the country making corrections to signs they believed contained errors? For their efforts, the language-fixers, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, got banned from certain national parks.<\/p>\n
I wrote about this team who would arm themselves with Sharpies, erasers, adhesive tape and righteous indignation.\u00c2\u00a0They’ve\u00c2\u00a0faded from the news, but if they wanted an assistant, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d try to join them.<\/p>\n
Besides, what business do people have displaying typos in public places? And on that subject, has anyone ever seen an obscenity or scatological message, emblazoned on a building or underpass, that contained a typo? Why is it that the army of spray-paint vandals always manages to spell correctly?<\/p>\n
Obsessed by the printed word, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve mentioned, for example, a local marquee that advertised \u00e2\u20ac\u0153BBQ Wigs,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or the many times the Robertson High School electronic sign introduced a new interscholastic sport: scooer, supposedly an improvement on soccer. But typos aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the only distracters. The much-abused apostrophe (or the lack of it) probably appears in half of the errors up for display.<\/p>\n
One of my favorites, of course, is the warning that illegally parked cars \u00e2\u20ac\u0153will be towed at owners expense.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d If one car is scheduled to be hauled off, behind a tow truck, the singular car ought to use \u00e2\u20ac\u0153owner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But since the sign refers to more than one vehicle, the correct punctuation ought to be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153owners.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But in many cases, not knowing which option to use, people simply omit all apostrophe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.<\/p>\n
I believe much linguistic carelessness comes from declining reading ability. The message is simple: The more you read, the better you write (and spell).<\/p>\n
Headlines create problems. Few people outside of the newspaper business realize that certain components in each Macintosh computer in every newsroom conspire to change what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve carefully written. These scheming parts of the computer don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem content merely to misspell one of our headline words; no, they change the word to something else, compounding and guaranteeing our embarrassment.<\/p>\n
A man with volumes of misspellings and other errors is Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English. People who observe unusual expressions notify Lederer, who has put them into books and calendars.<\/p>\n
Note that headlines, because of their telescopic, elliptical nature, often turn nouns into verbs, and vice-versa. Thus, the headline, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153U.S. Ships Head to Somalia\u00e2\u20ac\u009d means either that our country has done a ghastly, ghoulish trick, with help from UPS, or else it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s simply sent some vessels toward another country. Take your pick: a verb or a noun.<\/p>\n
The language cop in me wants to add a few words of explanation when public signs seem confusing. For example, Lederer refers to a sign at the entrance to a college cafeteria: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Shoes are required to eat in the cafeteria.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But pencilled underneath are the words: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Socks can eat anywhere they want.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another interesting construction from Lederer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dictionary: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153During the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Many errors derive from misunderstandings. Any Sunday School class for little children is a fertile field of amusing and confusing terms. My friend, Klare Schmidt, forwarded me an email that told about a child\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s report on Judas Asparagus. Out of the mouths of babes!<\/p>\n
And we hear, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no fried chicken.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Joe Thiesmann, a former Washington Redskin quarterback, once said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Others, gleaned from Lederer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s collection and other sources:<\/p>\n
If there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no emergency, where are these cramped lifeguards?<\/p>\n
And possibly the most common conditional conundrum gets uttered almost every day. Walk into a restaurant where the waitperson greets you by announcing he or she will be your waitperson for the evening. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll hear something like, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you need anything, my name is Ashley.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
And that invariably makes me want to ask, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And if we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need anything, what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s your name?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
You may have received an email announcing that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in a month that contains five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays. Three consecutive weekend days on the calendar with a frequency of five seems impressive.<\/p>\n
I believed it until I checked this month\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s calendar, which shows that the three consecutive days with five occurrences are actually Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. That happens in any month with 31 days.<\/p>\n
The email claims this event happens only once every 823 years. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an easier way to prove this, short of waiting around. Just check the calendar.<\/p>\n
The correspondence also promises that once we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve experienced this five-weekends-in-a-row phenomenon, which they call \u00e2\u20ac\u0153money bags,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll receive friends and money in four days.<\/p>\n
Another Website, Hoax-Slayer reassures us that the issue described in wildly circulation emails, the three-consecutive five-day months, occurs much more often than we think.<\/p>\n
We might even wish to stick around for those events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remember a few years back that a pair of human spell-checkers made the news for traipsing around the country making corrections to signs they believed contained errors? For their efforts, the language-fixers, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, got banned from certain national parks. I wrote about this team who would arm themselves with Sharpies, erasers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":942,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}