11.19.08
Posted in typographical errors at 8:00 am by Bill Brohaugh
I may have discovered a single source for two of the attacks leveled at Barack Obama by his election opponents. Said attacks are 1) accusations from multiple surrogates that Obama subscribes to every leftist ideology they could name, and 2) Rudy Guiliani’s vacuous laff-a-minute RNC mockery of Obama as a community organizer. Bad community! Bad community!
This may all stem from a typographical error.
Over at Regret the Error blog, Craig Silverman alerts us to this correction from The Los Angeles Times:
Li Ximing obituary: A headline on the obituary of Chinese government official Li Ximing in Wednesday’s California section described Li as a Community Party leader. It should have described him as a Communist Party leader.
It all makes nonsense to me now.
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08.19.08
Posted in language misuse, punctuation, spelling, typographical errors, verbal stupidity at 12:01 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Excuse me while I crawl into Jonathan Swiftian “infusion of Enthusiastick jargon” depression mode. Here’s a brief quote from an online chat I was privvy to recently. Among the noncapitalization, the elipses longer than the Panama Canal, the fact that someone thinks Deep Space Nine is entertaining, and the misspelling, note the irony of the quickly following self-correction (which was apparently the subject of some thought) contrasted with the beginning of the original post.
DisguisedName: lol im watching the funniest episode of deep space 9 ever lol…………..ferengi thinking they are commandoes
DisguisedName: commando’s
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07.11.08
Posted in typographical errors, writing craft at 3:48 am by Bill Brohaugh
I love the smell of irony in the morning.
Like any written medium, blogs must respect not necessarily the craft of writing, but the craft of communication, which in turn respects its component tools—one of which is writing. This basic concept doesn’t seem to resonate with some who think that blogs must be raw to be true to their form . . . to the point that blogs aren’t really blogs if they’re “too polished”—which means what? Breathless prose? Redundancies? Typos? Doesn’t this world have too much of those already?
For a strong rebuttal of such “thinking,” see this “Bad Advice From a Marketing Guru” post from Ron Shevlin’s Marketing Whims blog. Ron primarily talks marketing in the financial services arena, but he dabbles in the pitfalls of modern communications in general, as well.
But back to the morning’s cup of irony, from (of course!) a blog:
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06.17.08
Posted in grammar, language misuse, punctuation, typographical errors, word misuse at 11:46 am by Bill Brohaugh
From a press release I received recently:
I wanted to give you a head’s up that . . .
Well, we needn’t worry about what the press release was touting. We must instead fuss about apostrophes whilst I don my persnickitor hat.
The apostrophe in “head’s up” has, of course, wandered in from the great catapostrophic* void. As the phrase is presented here, the press-release author is giving me an up that apparently belongs to a head.
“Heads up!,” as all of us except the press-release writer already know, is a warning call, akin to shouting “Fore!” when teeing off. We used the call quite a bit in my thankfully brief days in the theatre. While building sets or mounting lights, the occasional clumsy technician (whose days in the theatre would be thankfully brief) might drop something or knock something over, potentially onto someone’s head. Heads up! Or, more succinctly, Heads! And not Head’s! It’s very difficult to shout an apostrophe.
Do catapostrophes make you cringe happily, the way people go to horror movies or take ride roller coasters to scream in fear and have fun? Check out the Apostrophe Abuse blog. My favorite abuse recorded there? “Bake’t muffin.” That should make my head spin. Instead, it make’s my head’s pin.
And for more happy cringing, I point to a sample entry from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong: “Plural’s: You do not use an apostrophe when forming plurals.”
* Neologism alert: Catapostrophic—related to an apostrophe catastrophe. End Neologism Alert.
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06.05.08
Posted in grammar, humor, typographical errors, word misuse at 5:38 pm by Bill Brohaugh
The half-reason to not learn English from sportswriters in the headline above comes from telling half the story . . .
. . . old-fashioned pitcher’s duel . . .
One pitcher dueling with himself? On the psychiatrist’s couch, maybe. I submit that perhaps pitchers’ duel or simply pitchers duel (with pitchers serving as a descriptive adjective and not a possessive) would signal the extreme likelihood that two pitchers were engaging in the activity described by that time-honored word with “two” implicit in its meaning.
For more such apostrofreak fun, visit Apostrophism, the apostrophe abuse blog.
And, what the heck, here’s an unrelated bonus clipping:
I’m not above a cheap shot—mainly because I’m so rarely in a position to pull one off. But you gotta love this typo a few days back in a link to a New York Times story (which has no headline typo when you arrive):
Oh, imagine the “party politics” we’re going to miss at such Democratic “fun-raisers”!
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