People who flaunt the fact that they regularly flout the law often regret it later.
Don't lose sight of the fact that there's a face-eating monkey on the loose.
Half a bottle of Xanax can have a serious effect upon your affect.
Dear proofreaders of America:
My blood pressure would thank you ever so for taking note of these.
We don' need no steenking proofreaders. We haz spelczech.
ReplyDeletewv chirt n. the delicate sound of Mustang tires meeting the runway.
It's obvious that they don't know what to do with grammar and all of its intricacies.
ReplyDeleteYou pay premiums to companies that insure your vehicle, thus allowing you to ensure your boss you can get back and forth to work.
ReplyDeleteI confess to having to triple=check my usage of effect/affect when I get goin'...
ReplyDeleteYou would think that, as often as I find myself stopping to make sure I'm using affect/effect correctly, I'd have it down pat by now. Yet I still find myself running to dictionary.com on my phone to make certain I'm using the right word.
ReplyDeleteOf course, you would also think that people whose livelihood consists of ensuring that grammar and vocabulary are being used properly in published materials would actually be good at it.
Do you have any words for passenger pigeons you want those proofreaders to pass on?
ReplyDeleteOf course, you would also think that people whose livelihood consists of ensuring that grammar and vocabulary are being used properly in published materials would actually be good at it.
ReplyDeleteBased upon the fact that people in other fields are good at their jobs?
If so, I'd like to introduce you to my cow-orkers.
Will's ring his dad brought back from Egypt is 22 karat gold; if he wanted to add more bling, he could have a nice 1 carat diamond mounted in it.
ReplyDelete(n/a for our euro brethren; they use carat or simply c for gold fineness, also while standards in the US are set at 10, 14, and 18K for jewelry, 9C is common in TPWGBUTB, and there's a ton of 8 karat (and lower) flooding in from Mexico)
AT
You cannot allow poor usage to continue unchecked without encouraging more "whole language" (they teach this crap in school! Hurray, Teachers Unions and the US Department of Education!) usage, where if it looks or sounds close - it is just fine.
ReplyDeleteEmployers cannot penalize people for grammatical, spelling, or word mistakes without running afoul of cultural diversity or hate crime accusations. Thus, few people face consequences for errors, oversights, and slips and other typos. It is enforcement that makes the rule a rule, not publication of the rule.
Letting texting-speak persist and spill over into "real" communications probably sends the wrong message as well.
Kby4now
AT,
ReplyDeleteAh, now I see what you did there... :o
Caws and Affect...
ReplyDeleteThe noise from the crows caused the nervous tic...
wv="miwar": personal possessive battle...
Me? Guilty.
ReplyDeleteYou shake your head for no, and nod your head for yes.*
ReplyDelete(*Admittedly, according to Dictionary.com, to "shake one's head" can also mean "to indicate approval, agreement, affirmation or acceptance by nodding one's head up and down", but note that to "shake" your head yes, you have to nod your head. Saying "she shook her head yes" may be technically correct, but it's also confusing.)
Tam:
ReplyDeleteI feel your pain. I was told in high school that I should be an English teacher. I was the one who consistently won spelling bees in grade school; the one who scored "A+" on term papers for correct use of grammar; the one who insisted that he review the kids' writing before they submitted to their teachers. And, the one who repeatedly pissed off the ex- (California educated) by grimacing when she blew a pronunciation or conjugation...
And I'm not claiming to be smart or all that well educated (high school dropout due to family horrors)...I am simply a voracious reader; one picks up a "feel" for the correct way through practice, practice, practice...
cap'n chumbucket
Tam,
ReplyDeleteThe maddening thing is that I see so much of this in print media now. The one that occurs most often seems to be the interchangeability of "loose" and "lose".
I won't even go into the stuff I find in police reports. My officers dread getting their reports kicked back after I apply the "red pen", but the result is that the DA's office frequently compliments my department on the quality of our reports.
Another pet peeve: when some Talking Head blathers about a hurricane and says "the Winds are moving at 25 Knots per hour", when the measurement implies both Time and Distance. Frackin' Weather Channel!
ReplyDeleteTo quote a simple version of this I saw on facebook. "THEY'RE going THERE with THEIR friends. It's called grammar."
ReplyDelete(if there is a face eating monkey on the loose, maybe I should loose the monkey eating dogs.)
I fancy myself as having a better-than-average command of the English language (for what it's worth) and there is a serious problem I have noticed with others' gross negligence in their use of language on the internet.
ReplyDeleteI have caught myself on more than a few occasions having to stop for a moment to think about my use of a particular word, in spite of my usage having been correct.
I think that comes from having seen the same set of words constantly and consistently misused. It's like the lie which is told often enough becomes the truth. I have to agree with others on here with regard to the horror of seeing such egregious errors making their way into print media.
Perhaps a retreat into classic literature or at least, pre-1990's printings of contemporary writing could be the answer.
I once had an accident wherein I rear-ended a little old lady who had slammed on her brakes due to someone ahead of her doing the same.
ReplyDeleteThe policeman who wrote the ticket cited me for "following to close."
After I thought about it a while, I decided that even if I brought up the grammatical error in court, the ticket would still accurately describe what I had done.
I get very tired of people speaking of "The right to bare arms".
ReplyDeleteYou pay premiums to companies that insure your vehicle, thus allowing you to ensure your boss you can get back and forth to work.
ReplyDeleteUm, no.
You You pay premiums to companies that insure your vehicle, to ensure that you will have working wheels, so that you may assure your boss you can get back and forth to work.
You assure other people, while you ensure that certain actions take place.
I will never entirely forgive psychologists.
ReplyDeleteWell, for lots of things...but especially for permanently disabling the simple "'affect' is a verb and 'effect' is a noun" rule.
These discrete senses of various words often leave people confused, even those who discreetly wish others would use the words correctly.
ReplyDeleteYou have peaked my interest in homonym murdering.
ReplyDelete@pax
ReplyDeleteThis is my embarrassed face.
I knew it looked wrong when I wrote it this morning, but I could not warp it around correctly in my brain.
I blame it on a lack of coffee.
"Mike Hammer drinks beer because I can't spell cognac." -Mickey Spillane
ReplyDeleteI tend to rag on people who insist upon using the word "golf" as a verb. As in "You going golfing today?" I answer "No. I think I'll go play golf."
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't "go golfing" any more than I'd "go baseballing" or "go hockeying".
Jon B.
Yep, that's what I get for believing my spell-checker, as it refused to accept the correct word.
ReplyDeleteJon B.:
ReplyDeleteUnlike "football" or "hockey", "golf" is actually a verb as well as a noun.
golf: -verb (used without object) 3. to play golf. [Dictionary.com]
I'm not sure if "golfing" is a proper conjugation of the word or not, but "Are you going to go golf today?" would actually be a correct usage of the word.
Too many times they don't think to use two instead of to when they are counting.
ReplyDeleteAnon with the "mountaintop", was that satire, or did you mean "piqued", which refers to curiosity?
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's this one: "Woken up". There's no such word as "woken". One either "woke up", awakened", or "was awakened". But I see this all the time, even in novels now.
Jake:
ReplyDeleteMaybe "golf" is a verb at dictionary.com but it's only a noun in Webster's 9th.
Jon B.
"I will never entirely forgive psychologists.
ReplyDeleteWell, for lots of things...but especially for permanently disabling the simple "'affect' is a verb and 'effect' is a noun" rule."
Actually that has helped me understand the concepts better.
Then again, English is not my native tongue and my wife is a psychologist.
Terry
Dear God! If I hadn't been married to the L&T for the last 40 years I would make you an offer I wish you wouldn't refuse. Bless your little snarky posterior for airing this to the hoi polloi.
ReplyDeleteWould you consider associate-wife status? (Just a joke - L&T would terminate me with extreme prejudice - and then consider my good taste.... She's an English major).
Rouge is a cosmetic, a rogue is a person of dishonest or unprincipled behavior, or person/thing that behaves in some unpredictable way.
ReplyDeleteLately I see references to "tow the line." That one's a major teeth gritter for me.
ReplyDeleteSteve,
ReplyDeleteThat was last Sunday. :)
"Lay your hat down and lie down beside it."
ReplyDeleteAnd don't get me started on people's using first person pronouns rather than possessive pronouns before gerunds.
Dictionary.com = a wretched nest of muddle-headed descriptivists.
@ Steve Skubinna,
ReplyDeleteUm, "teeth gritter"? Using an invented phrase that is a bit of creative verbing is a surprising thing to do in a vent about improper word usage.
@ Ferret,
There is a difference between precision and accuracy; I fight it myself.
That is, I can lay out a board and read the tape measure to precisely 3 and 13/64ths of an inch, which is moderately precise. But if I didn't get the end positioned correctly, I might miss the more accurate measure of 4 1/4th inches (on a piece 4 5/16ths long). The 4 1/4th measure is much more accurate, though less precise.
Precision in language has its place. Accuracy - getting the measure, the content - closer to correct is the important part.
Word usage and even the discussion of how sloppy people are about word usage and word choice, vs. why we should care - that happens all the time at Daily Writing Tips, http://www.dailywritingtips.com/.
Please don't confuse strict or correct language skills with clear or cogent thinking, nor with value nor worth of a person. A dude with impeccable language skills might still be worthless as snot on a doorknob at herding cows. Metaphorically speaking.
I bet that y'all would even disagree that The One's minions toad the line!
ReplyDeleteI do abhor the abuse of the word "transparent" when used in context of human (or even political) activity.
ReplyDeleteTransparent means it can be seen through, that vision isn't obstructed. Glass (when clear) and air are transparent; at times so is water.
The process a political or other organization uses to achieve a task is largely ephemeral and metaphysical. There is literally nothing there to be seen. When you want visibility into the workings of a group, when you want assurance that rules and ethics inform the action, then you want visibility into the workings of the group. Back in the day we talked about such thing as shedding light on questionable dealings, we passed sunshine laws to assure that meetings and agreements were conducted according to law, courtesy, and with fairness to those involved.
"Open and honest", I think, would be more what I really want to know about Congressional and Presidential actions. Open so that they stop organizing their shenanigans away from the press and scrutiny of the average citizen, and outside the legal bounds of the law and accepted (expected) practice. And honest in a way that is fair to all.
Leave transparency to the overhead projector crowd.