I know this is a rant of long standing, but when you’re making up a sign that a lot of people are going to see, or that may be up for a long time advertising your ignorance, you just might want to check your spelling:
1.) They put up a banner in front of town hall here honoring a returning soldier. It lists his “Infintry” company. Please don’t deprive Infantry of its “A”, and do the guy the honor of spelling it properly.
2.) I was at an amusement park recently, and saw a sign at the snack bar for “Children’s Flouridated Water”* I know people just don’t feel right about that “uo” rather than “ou”, but it’s correct, and you oughtta check it. It’s on the bottle!
*This is almost worth a thread in itself. The fluoridation dispute has flared up again, here and there, after being a relic of the 1950s for so long. But this is the first I’ve heard of people selling fluoridated water for kids. And at an amusment park, no less.
Actually, fluoridated water can be bought at most grocery stores – it’s usually called “Nursery water.” Being on well water here, and only drinking bottled water, our doctor suggested that we buy it – and we did, until our dentist prescribed a special toothpaste for us instead. At an amusement park is a little odd, though.
Oh, and flouridated just looks wrong. And Firefox doesn’t like it either!
Yesterday we went to Linens N Things in Springfield, looking for dorm stuff. They had a purple silky sleep mask, embroidered with black, saying “Need cafiene.” Maybe a joke, as in I can’t spell until I’ve had my coffee, but, jeezz.
Get used to it, everybody. Now that there are spellcheckers, actually knowing spelling is the stuff of pedants and freaks, and go-getting businesspeople want no part of it.
We have three kinds of timesheets used by the employees we do payroll for: daily, weekly, and biweekly. So which pile should I look in if she tells me a person uses “by weekly” timesheets?
She also is under the impression that the plural of foreman is foreman’s .
She’s been annoying me for non-spelling-related reasons lately, so I needed to vent. Thanks for reading.
Really, this is mainly a problem of the English language, where spelling is seemingly completely random & irrational. People have said that the spelling rules for English are more a collection of exceptions than actual rules. (There may be historical and merger reasons for most of these odd spellings, but that matters little to a user.)
You shouldn’t blame the users for the poor quality of the tool.
Especially as the errors are generally minor – the meaning of the sign was clear, and that is the purpose of language, after all.
I’ll confess - I’m a terrible speller. That’s why I keep a dictionary by my desk at all times, and I look things up. Not spell check - look the &^^& thing up so you’ll know you’re using the correct word, and not an incorrect word spelled correctly.
I’m sorry, t-bonham, but I don’t buy that argument. It’s hard to play piano well, too, but that’s no excuse for playing badly. It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, especially when they’re the same tools that everyone else has.
No, I blame them for not using the right tool–the dictionary. This isn’t writing on the bathroom wall, it’s the first thing people see about your business. Just making your meaning clear is not enough and it’s ridiculous to suggest that it is. The meaning of this is perfectly clear:
I’m not sure if this falls under spelling or general stupidity, but a coworker once asked me to write a database query to “compulate” some production figures. I think I ignored him.
As I’ve posted before, the deterioration of grammar, including spelling, can be traced back to this bombshell dropped in 1985 by the National Council of Teachers of English. It was the outgrowth of a series of studies done in the 1950s and 1960s and was completely misunderstood by English departments in teacher-preparation colleges and universities all over America. In fact, those studies are a major piece of the background to my master’s thesis, which I’m starting to work on this summer. Those studies and the NCTE position statement led to such atrocities as “inventive spelling” in the 1980s and the generally dismal state of grammar in America today.
The good news is that NCTE has seen the error of its ways, and its 1991 position statement is more grammar-friendly.
Oh, bull. Spelling is no more difficult now than it was in the '50s, when I was in elementary school. We learned to spell correctly by learning phonics. We learned correct grammar by diagramming sentences. And if we made a mistake, we didn’t whine that the language is “seemingly completely random & irrational.”
There’s a “vegitarian” restaurant in my town. I’ve never eaten there.
One of my most annoying mannerisms is to point out every typo or spelling error I see on TV. During the local news, it gets ridiculous. (I have to commend my husband for not holding a pillow over my face). But didn’t somebody type that out knowing it was going to be shown on TV? If a person like me can find the error with a glance, couldn’t they just have somebody glance at it before they put it on screen?
