Certainly isn’t unanimous. Among the sheer volume of stuff he put out, there are a few nice bits here and there that I like, but I find most Mozart to be inane, annoying, virtually unlistenable, definitely not of outstanding quality. I’ll avoid concerts if they are Mozart-centric. He definitely wouldn’t crack the top 20 classical composers as far as my tastes are concerned.
And I of course am an expert. I have ears and taste and stuff. (Seriously, aside from possessing a very deep familiarity with classical music, I can’t think of what would qualify or disqualify a person from being an “expert” at the greatness or lack thereof of any given classical musician)
I’m going to echo this one, confused smileys and all.
Professional writer here who’s got a loooong list of publications–and who’s had a number of disagreements with editors over “proper” grammar.
I thought I had heard all the pet peeves out there–but I’ve got to say, I’ve managed to miss this one.
BTW, it might be instructive to google the phrase “you’ve got” in conjunction with various well-known authors: we’ve got plenty of evidence that folks like Faulkner, Dickens, and Twain had no issue with it.
Ooh! I almost did that once in a YA novel. There was a minor character I named Frank. I decided late in the game to change his name to Mike (I forget why), and did the search/replace function. When I gave the ms a final once-over just before sending it in, I was surprised–and at first confused–to see the following line of dialogue, or something very like it:
“Mikely, you’re not as funny as you think you are,” Jessica said.
Wait, I thought, there are no characters named Mikely. And anyway she’s talking to her brother, who has an entirely different name, and–
oh.
Some people object to it on the grounds that the “got” is redundant and unnecessary.
When I was a kid, I had a book on grammar by Munro Leaf that came out very strongly against “got.” I can’t find that particular page online, but here’s a taste of what the book was like.
See the Grammar Girl column: Is “Have Got” Acceptable English? I’d like to see an authoritative cite, if Stink Pot Fish has one, that “have got” is officially Grammatically Incorrect.
Even if “musician” is replaced by “composer”; I think Bach might get at least as many votes as either of these.
The staff at the San Francisco Chronicle is not well versed in zoology. The other day they ran a photo of a great egret with a caption identifying it as a snowy egret. But that’s nothing compared to the article they ran a while back suggesting that the park was hopping with “newly hatched” baby frogs.
The VP of Operations comes around, handing everyone the new Corporate Quality Manual.
I found twenty spelling and grammar errors on the first page. The book was utterly riddled with them. I marked them all up, and gave the copy back to him.
He was hugely embarrassed. It was tracked back to a version control error: they’d published a preliminary version, not the final version.
The QUALITY manual! Holy Hannah!
(Not bragging: I wrote a memo which advised people not to “horde” toner cartridges. Oopsie.)
There have been lots in the English-language press in Thailand. One that springs to mind immediately is a couple of years ago, a Thai business reporter was interviewing a visiting South Korean tycoon. She reported him as saying South Korea was a very confusing society. A day or two later, the newspaper ran a correction stating the tycoon had actually called South Korea a very Confucian society.
Another one from the press in Thailand. As many of you know, Thaksin Shinawatra’s sister Yingluck was prime minister from 2011 until last year, when she, like her brother before her, was overthrown in a military coup. Yingluck is not legally married but does have a common-law husband, and they have a son. It’s a poorly kept secret that she also has a regular piece on the side, some big-time Thai real-estate tycoon. One time reporters even caught her meeting up with him in a luxury five-star hotel in Bangkok when she was supposed to be attending a parliamentary debate.
So while she was still PM, the English-language daily The Nation was interviewing some people about some situation involving Yingluck, but she was not present. The reporter inquired into the name of Yingluck’s husband. He’s not very well known and keeps a very low profile. Someone in the group jokingly said the name of her real-estate boyfriend. The clueless reporter did not realize it was a joke and thought that really was the name. It got printed in the newspaper. Various upper management of The Nation got suspended for a week or two, and the newspaper had to print a public apology on the front page every day for a specified period in order to avoid a lawsuit.
A plain IMO mis-spelling, rather than a typo: but one which, for some reason, really irritates me, and which I’ve lately had, for sure, thrust in my face. Spelling the word “impostor” as “imposter”. Wiki says that the word is also spelled using the version with “e”; but to me, that spelling is wrong and an abomination.
There’s a British writer called Charlie Elder who specialises in rather nice, humorous, popular-natural-history books – I’ve just been reading his latest. He loves the word “impostor” – it must have occurred half a dozen times in this recent book – and he invariably commits the with-an-“e” mis-spelling. This marred a bit, for me, an otherwise enjoyable read. I’m contemplating writing a letter, via the guy’s publishers, headed “to Charlie Elder and his editors / proofreaders, if any”.
People have been having fun with the “gorilla / guerrilla” potential misunderstanding for a long time. The book 1066 And All That, published nearly a hundred years ago – I find it hilarious – follows the course of British history, gently mocking the very stilted way in which history was often taught in school in times past; and the pupils’ confused and fragmentary memories of same, many years after. Concerning the Napoleonic Wars, mention is made of the “gorilla war” in Spain, supposedly “so called because of the primitive Spanish method of fighting”. Adjacent, is a little cartoon of a Spanish peasant advancing – arms outstretched, in the very best great-ape rip-the-puny-human-apart manner – on a terrified French infantryman.
See also the “references in classic literature” here, which shows instances of it being spelled “imposter” by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
OK – my prejudice against “imposter” is plainly just a personal peeve, with no solid foundation; but, on the threshold of old age, I’ll find it difficult – likely impossible – to shed. Sorry, Robert, Mark, and Edgar Rice: I’ll admit that you’re not wrong, but I still think the “e” spelling is horrible.
I recently read Dan Simmons’s The Fifth Heart, which has Sherlock Holmes teamed up with Henry James. A lot of it is from James’s point of view, and so there is a lot of discussion of language and writing. So it was particularly annoying to see the author refer to “a type of deciduous holly that stayed green all winter,” and to call someone “stolid” but “animated” a few chapters later. It was referring to a fat woman, so apparently he thought that “stolid” and “solid” were interchangeable.
The crowning moment came at the end when he thanked his editor, a woman who claimed to suffer from “obsessive compulsion disorder.” I don’t think she is suffering enough.
Dewey Lambdin, in his “Alan Lewrie” series of Napoleonic naval adventures, insists that “forty” is spelled “fourty.” He does this with absolute consistency.
This, too, might not be “wrong,” but it’s damned unorthodox!