Is “musician” even synonymous with “composer”? :dubious:
Googling “history’s greatest musician” brought up this list, which puts someone other than Mozart or Beethoven at Number One…
In Spider Robinson’s “Callahan’s Con” there is a series of mistakes like that - person X breaks something, and later someone refers to the object broken by person Y, etc. It looks like Robinson added a new character and plotline (the Childrens’ Services rep), and didn’t smooth out the effects of the additions.
I’ve said it before, but in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 the city of Killeen TX is misspelled every time it appears (and it shows up a lot) as “Kileen”.
Interesting. I searched for that name in Google and the first 7 results are for Wilhelm. Is “William” more common in elementary school textbooks or similar?
Indeed, “Wilhelm” is accurate–he was German, and that was his given name. I would have referred to him in the book as “Wilhelm.”
Which is actually fairly standard in dealing with German names in English: we generally call the German emperor during World War I “Wilhelm” rather than “William” (when we aren’t mixing it up and informally calling him “Kaiser Bill”), we don’t refer to the great works of the composer John Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka does not become Francis, nor does Heinrich Heine become Henry, the astronomer Johannes Kepler is never referred to as John, etc.
Of course, this guy had an umlaut in his last name, so there’s that…
But unless the house style for the book in question was to change all foreign first names to their English equivalents, or at least those that have an obvious cognate, “Wilhelm Roentgen” would have been a more defensible choice.
–“Wolf” the Unwashed
Thanks so much for that link! Very amusing in some ways but hard to argue with the choices (except the #1) and a couple I never heard before.
Well worth reading if only for Fela Kuti. Anyone who doesn’t know him, check thisout.
Michael Jackson is the fourth greatest musician of all time? And their explanation is that a lot of people made jokes about him while he was alive, but they make fewer jokes now that he is dead. The live joke to dead joke ratio is the measure of a great musician?
The theme park, Tokyo DisneySea, opened in 2001. A year before, the Oriental Land Company (OLC), the company that owns and operates the park, opened a preview website.
The English-language site had the following intro on its home page:
It may not have been a completely innocent mistake. The Japanese word for “Oriental” is “Toyo”. OLC fully funded the construction of the park. 
One of my best friends from high school lived in Waco for several years just out of college. She’s a teacher, but for a short stretch she was burned out and ended up getting a job at a place that does tutoring. (She’s gone back to teaching and bless all teachers, b/c I do not know how you do it.)
Working at this tutoring place, she got some swag of four free tickets to a Waco Wizards hockey game. (Why they bothered to have a hockey team in Waco–AND name it the Wizards I will never understand.) The company had bought ad space in the program and tickets were given out.
So we went. She and her husband and me and my other best friend from highschool .
So we’re checking out the program and we get to the ad for the tutoring place. Which says (over some nice stock footage; it was a well laid out full-page ad):
“Bring you children to Tutoringplace!”
YOU children. In an ad. For a tutoring place.
Well, of course we all lost it. And the guys went to go get beers, and I’m still cracking up and telling her, “Omg, I have to like send this in to Jay Leno or something! Omg!”
She got the most pained look on her face and begged me not to, b/c I think you see this coming—she was the person who had ok’d the ad. And missed the awful typo.
I used to work at a company that had a technical publications department. They prepared all the customer documentation. Nobody in the department was actually familiar with our products, they just cut and pasted paragraphs from internal memos and cleaned them up a bit. Then the document was sent for review before being published.
One document presented for review has a sentence like this:
If you put the ice cream in the freezer, it will melt.
Half the reviewers changed it to read:
If you do not put the ice cream in the freezer, it will melt.
The other half changed it to read:
*
If you put the ice cream in the freezer, it will not melt.*
So the writer dutifully incorporated all their comments and the final version that went to the customers read:
If you do not put the ice cream in the freezer, it will not melt.
And I can’t count the number of times that the writers put paragraphs like this into the review copies of documents to be made public:
The following is company-proprietary information and only to be be shared on a strict need-to-know basis…
I was on a review panel recently for new catalog software for my library. The proposal packet from one vendor couldn’t even bother to consistently spell the library’s name wrong: sometimes it was right, sometimes it was wrong, highlighting that a team of people had put the proposal together without talking to each other and then sent it out without any one person even so much as reading it.
Humor? Did you read the info at #1?
Back in the 1980’s (I think), the state of Pennsylvania slapped an ad slogan on all of the license plates for all passenger vehicles.
It read “You’ve Got A Friend In Pennsylvania”. They even recorded a song, and a number of commercials, and it was a pretty wide-spread campaign. Bumper stickers, buttons, etc. It was supposed to be on the same level as “Virginia is for Lovers” or “I Love NY”. State pride, and all that. Until someone pointed out that “You’ve got…” breaks down into “You have got…”, which is grammatically incorrect.
Pretty embarrassing… Can’t remember which politician had it changed, but they went back to “Keystone State”… can’t screw that one up.
Tell that to Carole King and Randy Newman. Grammatical or not, I think “you’ve got a friend” should get a pass as a well-established idiom.
I think there is a difference between something that is, as you say, a “well-established idiom”, vs. using a phrase as a slogan to advertise your state.
I didn’t write the rules of grammar, but the do exist, and even if something doesn’t hurt our ears or our ability to communicate an idea clearly, “You have got” is apparently grammatically incorrect. The fact that it went through so many eyeballs and levels of approval and still made it through to the license plates and advertising campaign just validates your point. It IS a phrase that has been used for a long time, and has been accepted as part of the language.
I don’t understand. You think it’s incorrect, or some dumbass politician does? 
I have three university degrees. I was reading at graduate level when I was in junior high. I work as a translator and editor. I sometimes teach English as a foreign language.
In what way is “you have got” gramatically incorrect???
Another thing that always makes me groan is when Americans (or members of any other nationality) who choose to live abroad are referred to in print as “ex-patriots.” :smack:
No doubt some of us are, but we generally prefer to be called “expatriates.”
Serendipitous
On page 247 of the book I’m reading right now (Castaway, Lucy Irvine):
“Even from this distance the moonlight picked out the shining whites of his eyes from this distance the moonlight picked out the shining whites of his eyes and a magnificent set of teeth displayed in a gleeful expostulating gently in a voice that identified her as female, leaned over and hit him on the head with a dark roll of cloth.”
I saw a reference to “dawizard” in a 2nd edition D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, which makes me think somebody did a global search & replace from “mage” to “wizard” and didn’t clean up afterwards.