We're Thinking He Missed Some Punctuation

We've watched this clip a couple of times now and do not believe this Dana person is taking the day off because he was murdered and set ablaze while celebrating his birthday.

Rather, we think Dana is taking the day off, and the subject of an entirely separate news report had the worst birthday ever. We can't see the teleprompter, but we bet there's a missing bit of punctuation--or even paragraph break--that would have made this a bit clearer. In any event, yikes!



Thanks to Peter W. for the video.

Typo Scuttles Launch

This caught our eye today:

July 22, 1962: Mariner 1 Done In by a Typo
By Tony Long July 22, 2009 12:00 am

When The New York Times copy desk lets a typo slip through, it’s embarrassing but no one gets hurt. When NASA programmers screw up, the consequences are a tad more dramatic, not to mention expensive. In this case, a “missing hyphen” in code forces mission control to abort the launch of the unmanned Mariner 1 probe less than five minutes after liftoff. (Read more.)

Is it just us, or should the "after" above actually read "before"? We're not rocket scientists, but can you stop something that's already happened? Is there a difference between launch and liftoff? Space cadets want to know.

Do You Think the Jury Will Notice?

Note to self:

When you become a dermatologist taking care of a world-famous celebrity who most likely has an addiction to the narcotic Demerol, have someone proofread your letter so that when the inevitable court case comes about, you don't look like you went to medical school in a South American strip mall.

Thanks to Jessica M. for the find.

Monkeying Around

These will be the monkeys who--someday, while smoking and pounding away on tiny typewriters--will someday reproduce Shakespeare's plays and poetry.

BBC: Monkeys recognise bad grammar

Oooh oooh! Aaaa aaa! (Insert armpit scratching here.)

Grammar in Politics

We are amused.

Punctuation in the Movies

Apparently the movie "What Just Happened" was originally marketed as "What Just Happened?"

What happened there isn't clear, but we enjoyed this column about punctuation in the movies. Apparently the hyphen is one dangerous character.

Diagramming Sentences

Confession time: When we first heard about sentence diagramming, we tingled with excitement. Our anticipation soured, however, when we learned that sentence diagrams were not pictures that went along with the words. This sour feeling turned to out-and-out nausea when we actually took to the task of diagramming, which our teacher made us do with a ruler to ensure every line was straight.

We do not like sentence diagramming. Nor do we like fancy terms for parts of speech and constructions. Like raw oysters and roasted beets, those are fine things for people who like those things. We are not those people.

Nonetheless, we recommend this Slate article on diagramming Sarah Palin's sentences.

The author argues that sentence construction offers a window into the mind the person who spoke or wrote it. We tend to agree. Sarah Palin, alas, has uttered some sentences that are the equivalent of a window overlooking a scrap heap. Grammarians can't find much meaningful substance in a few of her more notorious squirts of prose.

We do take issue with one point in the Slate article--that a really complex, convoluted sentence can signal a "richly educated mind" with a "Proustian" grasp of language. That's crap. Truly finely tuned minds can take complicated ideas and express them so that people don't need to whip out a straightedge and Warriner's English Grammar and Composition to understand what's going on. It's an assault on the very notion of good writing to argue that such things should ever be needed to understand words on the page.

People who take pleasure in rat-nest constructions care more about impressing than communicating. They are the ones who write the textbooks that make students alternate between weeping and sleeping. They are the ones who write laws that confuse and alienate. They are the ones who write novels that are so inscrutable, very few people find actual pleasure in reading them--and instead have to settle for the satisfaction of completing them and the bragging rights they confer at cocktail parties with assorted cakesniffers.

Don't be cowed by this sort of thing. The difference between good writing and bad is the difference between steak and sawdust. You can chew on either, but no one who cares about you would feed you the latter.

A Day for Sausage Humor

The Nashville News found a funny typo on a sausage wrapper, using it an excuse to slip in a filthy punctuation-based joke. Equally funny are the jokes in the comments section. Bravo!

SPOGG in the News, Y'all

This comes from the Sunday Dallas Morning News:

Errors on signs becoming a 'regualar' occurrences

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, September 7, 2008
By ERIC AASEN / The Dallas Morning News
eaasen@dallasnews.com

A cup of regualar coffee sounds like the perfect way to start your day.

Wouldn't some cheep gas be nice? But if you park your car, you've been warned: No in-and-out priviliges.

These mangled spellings – on real-life signs around the Dallas-Fort Worth area – underline the obvious: Spelling isn't always high on our list.

And our grammar ain't that good, too.

It's enough to make your English teacher cringe – and drive others to break the law.

Last month, two men were sentenced to probation and banned from national parks for a year after getting busted for fixing errors on a sign in Grand Canyon National Park.

The men travel the country correcting signs as part of the Typo Eradication Advancement League.

Across the country and locally, the land is littered with signs, posters, ads, menus – you name it – that are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.

In some cases, human spell-checkers battle these boo-boos by fixing the errors on their own. Others snap pictures and trash the typos on their blogs.

Grammarians say these are bad signs of the times – our language is on a downward spiral. Others say: Lighten up.

Correct spelling and proper grammar matter and help us understand each other, said Martha Brockenbrough, who founded the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar.

Read more...

Trouble for TEAL

Thanks to all the SPOGG members who sent word about the fate of the Typo Eradication Advancement League. The men who've criss-crossed the country crossing out spelling errors in signs have received what some call their "comeuppance."

One of the signs they corrected was a 60-year-old piece in the Grand Canyon (a National Park), painted by the artist Mary Colter.

The members of TEAL had to pay $3,035 to restore the sign, and are banned from national parks for a year.

There are cheers and jeers coming from both sides of the fence. Many reasonable people, including John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun, thought TEAL was trivializing the pursuit of excellence in language. Others, including some of our beloved SPOGG members, offered to post bail.

Our thoughts on the matter: It's distracting, annoying, and often comical to see errors in signs. The only time we have taken a pen to one was in a classroom, where we neatly inserted an apostrophe where it belonged. The teacher wasn't looking and wasn't there, and we felt strongly that children should not be taught that "womens" is a word. Even so, we had pangs of conscience later.

Generally speaking, we leave signs alone. As we told a Christian Science Monitor reporter, people pay for those signs. We wouldn't want people to write on our stuff, and we don't write on other people's stuff. We aren't at all opposed to letters sent with humor and kindness, although we'd never send one to someone whose first language isn't English. It's hard enough starting over in a new country without having the natives poke fun.

Talking about errors in a blog is another matter, though. We can all learn from the discussion.

There is one correction, though, that we don't mind seeing. This photograph was taken by our friend Kat, of a bit of graffiti in her neighborhood.

That's One Angry Judge

Look! People do judge you for bad spelling and grammar at work. Apparently, it's worse when a judge is judging:

Angry judge has a spelling fit
Monday, August 11, 2008

A judge has labelled a prosecution worker an 'illiterate idiot' after spotting a spelling mistake.

Judge David Paget looked with disgust at an indictment accusing a man of assaults, including attempted 'greivous' bodily harm.

He fumed: 'The word grievous has been mis-spelt four times.'

Reading on, he said that another charge accused the defendant of using an offensive weapon, 'namely axe', instead of 'an axe'.

Note: in England, where this story originates, some past-tense verbs are "spelt" with a T on the end. In American English, you're more likely to see that spelled as "misspelled." Same goes with words like "labeled" and "traveled." These will have two Ls in the U.K., but generally only have one here.

How Not to Be Annoying

Apparently e-mail is the No. 1 means of annoying your co-workers. Perhaps even more annoying than stealing lunch. "Action News" (a name we love almost as much as we'd love "Inaction News") reports on the many ways one can e-grate.

We couldn't help but notice this word of caution from an etiquette expert:

For Pamela Eyring, the owner and director of the Protocol School of Washington, correct grammar and punctuation--whether it's avoiding the all caps curse or using spell check--is essential.

"When you're doing e-mails, the first thing you have to remember is that your e-mails reflect you," Eyring says. "So that e-mail courtesy is just like writing someone a letter: [You need] correct grammar, spelling and punctuation.

While it isn't scientific proof that bad grammar is annoying to encounter at work, we'll take it. (Read more.)

SPOGG Loves the Nashville Post

There's a Nashville Metro Council member who wants an English-only clause to be added to the city's charter. The notion behind it is that no one has a "right" to read government documents in any language other than English.

We love English. Truly, we do. But we do not love people who insist English be the only language spoken in the United States. As much as we love English and hope everyone learns to write and speak it well, we also love our immigrant population, many of whom are on their way to citizenship. Why make government services inaccessible? That seems rather mean, y'all.

This is why we took special delight in the Nashville Post's response to the drama. Editors there took a red pen to the letter sent to voters, which is nothing less than the English-only crowd deserves.

The result is priceless. Nashville Post, we salute you.

If you're interested in the Nashville English First petition, here it is.

Well, Isn't That Interesting

This comes from Science Daily (ignore the British spellings, please):

Intuitive Grammar Develops By Age Six, Say Researchers

ScienceDaily (Apr. 29, 2008) — Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that children as young as six are as adept at recognising possible verbs and their past tenses as adults.

In a study conducted by the University's Child Language Study Centre, children aged between six and nine were given sentences containing made-up verbs such as 'the duck likes to spling' and were asked to judge the acceptability of possible past tense forms. The study focused on the process the children used to come to their conclusions rather than whether their answers were right or wrong.

They found that the children's judgements followed a virtually identical pattern to those of linguistics students who took part in a similar study at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the US.

University of Liverpool psychologist, Ben Ambridge, said: "Previous studies have concentrated on getting children to produce past tense forms for made-up words. This study is unique in that the children were asked to judge the acceptability of different forms that we gave them.

"One of the main questions raised when looking at children's ability to pick up their native language is whether abstract symbolic rules or the use of memory and comparison affect how a child attributes past tenses to words.

Read more...

Show Me the Grammar

From the Kansas City Star:

Hyphen missing from new Missouri license plates
By MARCUS KABELThe Associated Press

Missouri will not correct a grammatical error in new license plates because that's how voters want it to be, a state Department of Revenue spokesman said Friday.

The plates featuring a bluebird, the official state bird, are due out in June despite the fact that they're missing the hyphen in the state's nickname, "Show-Me State."
David Griffith, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Revenue, said they won't correct the mistake because that's how it looked when voters chose it in an online contest last year.

"If the people want it that way, that's what we're going to deliver for the people," Griffith said.

The rules of grammar require the hyphen, Missouri Southern State University English professor Dale Simpson said. "If you have a compound modifier before a noun, it would be hyphenated," he said.

About 2 million of the plates have been produced so far, but another 10 million have yet to be made to fulfill demand for the next two years, Griffith said. The department could reorder the remaining majority of plates to include the hyphen but does not plan to do so, he said.

More...

The punchline? Fifty-six percent of the voters surveyed on the site said they didn't care about the hyphen. Oh, sadness!

Grammar Spoof!

Police today revealed that a 27 year old English teacher has been beaten to death by the checkout staff at a supermarket in Guildford, Surrey. An eye witness said "It was horrible- the man simply pointed out that the sign reading 'ten items or less' should in fact read 'fewer than ten items' because less means 'not as much' and fewer means 'not as many'."

Read more...

Creating Editing in Government

Michael V. sends this along from the New York Times. It's about limiting the ability of a governor to modify a bill by crossing out words--or even parts of words--to change the meaning of the legislation:

"Seventy-one percent of voters favored a referendum that read to outsiders like some indecipherable grammar lesson, barring the governor from creating “a new sentence by combining parts of two or more sentences.”
...

They have fought (and laughed) over this before. Voters limited the veto once before, in 1990, rejecting what critics then called the “Vanna White veto,” allowing a governor to cross out letters inside words to make whole new words.

With the letter-flipping practice banned, critics, led by Republican legislators, this time re-named their target the “Frankenstein veto,” focusing on the governor’s ability to merge whole sentences through deletions, and thus, they said, cobble together weird bits of provisions to create whatever monster one cared to.

Read the whole story, if you'd like to. It's creative editing, in its Frankenstein-esque glory. Think of the other applications of this... that memo from your boss? Edit it to say what you want to hear. The prenuptial agreement you signed with your sixth husband? You can make it better...

The Typo Eradication League

SPOGG member Dawn first pointed them out to us, and we've been following the adventures of the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL) ever since.

Newspapers and bloggers have covered the adventure, often observing that people like these "must be a nightmare at dinner parties."

Nyuk, nyuk.

Manners columnists, too, have opined that it's extremely rude to correct the grammar of others.

This gets us thinking... Why would it be annoying to have smart, knowledgeable people at your dinner parties? Has our society slid so much that we can only enjoy the company of others when they know less than we do? Since when is learning something new automatically a mortifying experience?

We definitely understand how it could be embarrassing to have one's grammar and typographical errors corrected. That doesn't mean there aren't kind, thoughtful and sensitive ways to do it, however. Our readers catch our imperfections regularly, and when they are gracious, we are grateful.

The blanket assertion that correcting grammar is universally rude is, we think, rather lazy. Is it similarly rude to point out to our friends when they have salad taking residence between their teeth? Or to alert them that their zippers have fallen? We let our friends know when these embarrassments happen because we wish to spare them greater embarrassment later. We do this kindly, gently, and with respect--and sometimes, even with humor.

There is no reason we can't apply the same compassionate techniques with grammar. We don't have to correct everyone's errors. We don't have to do it all the time. But when we fear it will cause mortification or rejection, we do it out of kindness (when we are certain, of course, that we are correct in our correction).

It is a fact that people are judged for their grammar.

We have written before about surveys of hiring managers in England, in which hiring managers reported being more bothered by grammar errors than they were by candidates who cursed in interviews. Likewise, raise your hand if you're not just a little bit turned off by a personal ad littered with spelling and grammar errors.

We might rail against this, saying that it's unfair and awful. In some cases, it no doubt is. To change this fact, however, we'd have to conclude that language standards are a bad thing. We do not believe this is the case. Language standards help us understand each other, across the room and across the span of years. Understanding is one of the fundamental challenges of humanity, and we're not about to discard a primary tool because of how we might come across at a dinner party.

In any case, however, we are charming at dinner parties--much more so than Johnny Bag of Hammers.

Grammar and Clarity

Every so often, you read posts by linguistic types arguing that grammar and clarity have nothing to do with each other. Sometimes, that's true. Even though "I feel badly" isn't grammatically correct, its meaning is clear enough.

We just read, however, that gun violence costs us $100 million a year. How much of that could we have avoided had the Founding Fathers been a bit more careful with their modifiers, or if earlier scribes had left the original punctuation intact?

This graphic comes from the Virginian-Pilot. Click here for the story.

To all those who argue that grammar and clarity are separate pursuits, we respond with this example. How long will the dispute go on?

The thing is, people rarely intend to be unclear with their writing and speech. The rules of grammar do, however, give a good framework for determining meaning. When the author of a statement is no longer alive to explain it, we can apply the rules and translate as well as we can. When those rules aren't followed, it becomes guesswork.

Good grammar doesn't guarantee you're saying anything worth reading. But we can't think of a better way to ensure people your words are understood.

SPOGG Might Have to Watch American Idol

But even if we don't, here's the guy we want to win. The reasons will be obvious when you watch the clip. (And lawsy, he even plays the guitar!)



Thanks to Michael V. for the tip. And Simon Cowell, you're wrong about charisma. Word nerds are foxy.