Live from New York!

My friend Lisa, a.k.a. the First Year Teacher, went to New York for the weekend.  She’s a grammar stickler in her own right and she took a few pictures of errors that she found.

Check them out:

This particular sign is fantastic for our amusement because the errors are so plentiful!  Which one is worse: the usage of the fake word lite, the hyphen in ice-cream, or the redundancy of diet lite?

Ah, comma, you truly are the ugly stepchild of this sign.  If only you had been a colon, a period or an exclamation point!

Also, I have some very exciting news in my life!  There are a few pieces of news, actually.  I can’t wait to unveil it all next week.

Thanks, Lisa!

Nice editing.

Every year, there is a page in my high school’s yearbook depicting fake or joke clubs.  During my senior year, my three best friends — Lisa, Alexa and Beth — and I, better known to the school and our town as The Brood, decided that we needed to be one of the fake clubs.

We got our picture taken and we were one of the three fake clubs featured on the page (along with the Breakfast Club and the Santarpio’s Club).  We needed a club description, so I volunteered to write it up.

The first two sentences:

“THE BROOD…scared yet?  Consisting of Lisa ‘I’m high on life’ L., Alexa ‘That’s crazy!’ M., Kate ‘Didn’t I meet you at the coed naked lawn-bowling party?’ McCulley and Beth ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ G., the Brood remains the most formidable foursome of fun fearless females in all of Reading High.”

It was perfect.

Was is the key word.  It was perfect until the editors massacred it.

Aside from changing remains to remians and changing individually to indivisually, each an egregious spelling error, they also changed my sentence structure.  The removed the comma after Beth’s last name and considered that to be a full sentence.

Yes, it’s a long sentence — but it’s not a run-on and it’s not grammatically incorrect.  Why change it?

This was probably one of the first times that I felt passionate about grammar.

I was the performing arts editor of my yearbook, a position given to me on a whim by the advisor, one of my all-time favorite teachers.  Although I had a LOT of fun adding pictures of the Brood to the drama club section wherever possible, after seeing the finished product, my heart ached.

I wistfully wished that I had been a copyeditor instead.  Oh, God, if only.

(Another thing they messed up: my family’s message to me became, “Kate, the years have flown by watching you blossom into a scintillating you woman.”  Young.)

I understand that responsibility of the yearbook falls on high school students.

But…not even a spell-check?

1 Sauce, 2 Sauce, 3 Sauce, FAIL

The following picture was snapped by reader Lindsey of Just Browsering:

Location: McDonald’s, somewhere in California (I believe)

You know, this makes me think about the effect that McDonald’s could have.  If a company as large as McDonald’s (or Starbucks — though Starbucks is losing the golden touch) made an effort to use perfect grammar on all signs, we might notice eventual long-term effects.

Of course, they’re supposed to be doing that anyway.

Hmmm.  There’s a bit of a hole in the logic…

Too much spam!

Spam!

I’ve been getting so much of it lately.  I never had a problem with spam when I was running this blog through Blogger.

It’s the kind with a bunch of nonsense words typed in the comments and then the Web site is a link to some kind of meds or something.

Any advice, fellow WordPress users?

The Newest BEST T-SHIRT EVER

I know I’ve been a bit heavy on T-shirt postings these days, but this latest T-shirt deserves attention.  As soon as I fully understood what it meant, I felt the urge to buy it, just for its grammatical correctness!

Check it out:

At first, I thought it said, “We’re #1.”  That would make it a nice antiquated T-shirt, reminiscent of the past.  But then I realized that I had read the words too quickly, and hadn’t noticed that there was no apostrophe.

The shirt is meant to read, “Were #1,” as in “Used to be #1.”

For that reason, I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS T-SHIRT.

Some of you know that I am a huge geography nerd in addition to being a grammar nerd.  In fact, I’m much more of a geography-phile than a grammar-phile.

Because of my geographic knowledge, I am particularly THRILLED that this shirt includes Northern Ireland in order to form the United Kingdom.  The United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; Britain consists of everything but Northern Ireland.

For those reasons, this shirt is PERFECT.

Buy it here.  It’s on sale for $14.99 this week.

I already own three shirts from bustedtees.com: Without Me, It’s Just Aweso; Irish I Were Drunk (I wear it exclusively on St. Paddy’s Day and on days when I go to Celtics games) and SILF.

I swear, Busted Tees isn’t paying me to advertise their wares.  The fact that the “Were #1″ shirt took me a second to actually get it made it well worth posting!

Passive-Aggressive Notes

I just discovered a delicious new Web site: passiveaggressivenotes.com.  There is so much great material there!

Check this one out:

Ordinarily, I dislike personification of inanimate objects, especially man-made objects like kitchen appliances.

Throw the grammatical errors into the mix and I just want to leave that refrigerator and freezer door wide open until the ice starts melting and dripping down onto the milk cartons!

Noisebot — Cheers and Boos

I am a fan of funny T-shirts (I wore my “Without Me, It’s Just Aweso” shirt when I did my Boston Globe interview, and I recently bought SILF from Busted Tees – that one was a hit at work!), and when I saw the ad for NoiseBot, I clicked on it.

Most of these shirts aren’t very funny, but I did like the one that said, “Make awkward sexual advances, not war.”

As I looked them over, I found two in particular that I thought would be of interest to you readers.  There is an awesome one and an awful one.  Check them out:

Awesome:

 

Awful:

We know why.

Beauty Overcomes Grammar

I’m watching Idol Gives Back on TV right now.  It’s heartbreaking.  (Click here to donate to Idol Gives Back, which divides the donations among six charities in the U.S. and in Africa.)

Many celebrities are making appearances on the show, including one of my favorite celebrity couples, David and Victoria Beckham.

Excerpts from their speech, which I wrote down as soon as I heard it:

Victoria: “David and myself are fortunate enough to be here [to be here to tell you to donate, etc. -- didn't get the whole thing].”
David: “Please join Victoria and myself in donating.”

The word myself is completely out of place.  It should be I in the first sentence and me in the second.

If you ever have doubt over whether you should say “and myself” — or “and I” for that matter — drop the other subject.

I am fortunate enough to be here — not myself is fortunate enough to be here.

Please join me in donating — not please join myself in donating.

I know that it’s not their fault.  The show’s writers are the ones to blame.  Though it’s within my rights to criticize them, I do feel a tad guilty insulting a good cause like this one. 

But I have to be honest with myself.  Even if they had written those awkward sentences themselves, I wouldn’t have minded.  They’re too damn good-looking.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time beauty caused me to overlook grammar errors.  I think my friends know where I’m going with this one.  :-/

Please donate if you can afford to do so.  $10.00 buys a mosquito net.  That could save one or more lives in Africa.

Everything’s More Erroneous in Texas

I was thrilled to receive a beautiful example of grammar vandalism from reader Jean Marie.

Check this out:

Location: College Station, Texas

I would say to insert your Texas stereotype here, but even I know that’s not the whole truth.  I’ve been to Texas (and had an absolutely AWESOME time there last year!) and got to see a part of the state that is completely different from what most people believe Texas to be.

Still, though, these signs could say that everything is bigger in Texas — in this case, the signs are more erroneous, the errors more egregious.

Jean Marie didn’t let that stand in her way.

She vandalized.

BEAUTIFUL.

Perfect.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Thanks, Jean Marie.

Old Spice Redundancy

I’m watching TV and this Old Spice commercial just came on:

If you can’t watch video right now, this is a commercial for Old Spice Hair and Body wash — which, they say, is “for hair and/or body — or both.”

Isn’t “both” already contained in the “and/or”?

Just saying.

Which languages do you speak?

I’ve been wondering about foreign languages and how speaking them impacts your native language.  For now, if you have a minute, I would love if you could answer this survey:

1. What is your native language?
2. Which foreign languages do you speak?  How well do you speak them?
3. How did you learn your foreign languages?
4. How often do you use your foreign language skills today?

Here are my answers:

1. English is my only native language.
2. I speak French, Italian and very bad Spanish.  Last time I was tested in French, I was rated “advanced high” by my professor.  Nowadays, I speak Italian conversationally at best, though I’m best in restaurants.  My Spanish is terrible and pretty much restricted to reading only.  Also, after receiving a Brazilian assignment at work last year, I learned that I can read Portuguese.
3. Though my dad’s family is proudly French Canadian, I learned French from studying it in high school and college.  I also did a two-week homestay in Normandy in high school and I’ve been to France several times.  I didn’t speak a word of Italian when I arrived in Florence for my semester abroad, but I learned quite a bit after four months there.  I taught myself Spanish I over a summer and took one year of Spanish II in high school.
4. At work, I’m the designated French speaker, so I get to speak French pretty often.  I use Italian at work occasionally, and Spanish rarely.  Besides conversing in basic Spanish with the guys at Anna’s Taqueria, I don’t use any of my languages outside of work (though my sister and I speak quite a bit of “franglais” to each other).

I’m glad that the state of Massachusetts and areas throughout the U.S. place such a high emphasis on foreign languages, even though English is the language of business these days.  It can make a big difference when it comes to your grammar.

Learning a foreign language strengthens one’s knowledge of his or her native language.  Suddenly, words are organized.  Everything is a reason.  Am, is and are mean the same thing — and boy, is our language confusing!

I’ve always loved books and writing, but my love of language didn’t come along until later.  I think it was the act of learning foreign languages and falling in love with them that taught me to love language itself.

Do you agree?

It was an April Fool’s Day joke!

Come on, you guys!  I thought you would be all over that!

It’s not like I claimed to be bought by Target, but still!

Did you just glimpse over it without noticing it?

The First Year Teacher’s Thoughts on Grammar

One of my best friends, Lisa, is in her first year of teaching both high school and college, with the occasional kindergarten class. She’s started a great blog detailing some of her experiences called First Year Teacher Resources. The other day, she wrote about outdated grammar rules and why she considers them to be that way.

Here’s a selection:

6. “He’s taller than me.” This is something I OVERHEAR all the time, and it’s starting to become a case of the who vs. whom debate. The “grammatically correct” term is “He’s taller than I” or “She’s smarter than I.” However, if someone is on the phone and a person asks, “Who is it?” The correct response would be “It is I”, when it’s really more socially acceptable (and much less haughty) to say, “It’s me.” Another issue of our language evolving, perhaps.

Click here to read the rest of them.

This is one subject on which I’m torn.  I don’t think that people are wrong when they say, “It’s me.”  To put it simply, there just following language as it has evolved.  There is only one time when I think I’ll do so — when I say “This is she” when answering the phone.

How about you?