bad spelling

Among the latest batch of rubbish press releases, one that is, quite literally, “crap”

While compiling candidates for inclusion in my latest collection of Crap Press Releases, I was delighted to come across one about travellers’ diarrhoea. Crap… Diarrhoea…  geddit?!

If it were not for the literal “crap” connection I wouldn’t have singled this one out for mockery – it’s actually an interesting, informative piece, with well-referenced data. My only grouse with it is the headline:

“What are the British bringing back from their holidays?”

When you have a perfectly good news angle – the statistic that up to 40% of UK holidaymakers get the squits while away – it seems a shame to have such a strangely meaningless headline. I suppose the idea is that positing a question as the headline makes the readers so curious they open the email to find the answer. But that seems a risky move – readers could easily assume this is about duty-free purchases, and if they have no interest in luxury goods retailing, they might not bother opening it.

Anyway, on to my second headline nomination. This one isn’t literally about crap; it just annoyed the crap out of me.

“Don’t accept lifts from strangers – or Timothy and Judith”

First reaction: WTF is this about? And that’s not a “I’m so intrigued about this that I will straight away open the email and enjoy finding out” sort of WTF, it’s an irritable “why can’t these people get to the point and say what the story is?” sort of WTF.

Well, it turns out – but not until the second para – that Timothy and Judith are the names most likely to claim on their car insurance. The release lists the other most likely names too. A good, fun, story, but the advice about not accepting lifts from strangers, which is repeated in the intro, had me baffled. The story didn’t appear to have anything to do with getting in cars with strangers. It wasn’t till I came to start writing this piece that I twigged. Yes, of course, it’s saying you shouldn’t get into a car with anyone called Timothy or Judith because the data would appear to suggest that they are more likely than average to have an accident. Hence they might have an accident while you are a passenger in the car. Haha, I see, it was a jocular remark.

At least, I assume it was jocular – I don’t imagine the insurance company behind the release is seriously suggesting that the statistical risks of sharing a car with Timothys and Judiths are so high as to make it genuinely inadvisable. Or are they? I don’t know, and that’s the problem. The trouble with light-hearted approaches in writing is that not all the readers will understand the writer’s sense of humour and will consequently not know whether to take statements seriously or not. It asks the reader to think far too much in order to understand what’s being conveyed.

I would have gone with a more straightforward approach like “Timothy and Judith are the names most likely to claim on their car insurance”.

Anyway, for anyone interested, the next most accident prone names are apparently Antonio, Julian and Bernard for boys and Joanna and Clare for girls.

Here’s one I don’t get at all.

“Sparkling diamond is crowned the city’s new jewel”

Don’t bother trying to work out what it’s about, cos you won’t. The news here is that a bar called Jewel, the third of the chain in London, has opened near St Paul’s. Why couldn’t they just say so?

I simply don’t see what a sparkling diamond has to do with it. I could understand it if the bar’s name was Sparkling Diamond, but it isn’t. And in any event, bars don’t get crowned. Neither do diamonds. In what way has anyone been crowned? It just doesn’t make sense.

Meanwhile, the text is littered with hyperbole and jewel-related synonyms. We have dazzled [twice], opulent, fabulous, fantastic, decadent, delectable, twinkling.

Ooh, it’s just like Santa’s fairy grotto. Or like a thesaurus that burst, scattering synonyms everywhere.

The bar, in a fabulously decadent mixed metaphor, “well and truly stamped its starry mark on the metropolis”. I have no idea how you stamp a starry mark but apparently it can be done.

Maybe this kind of thing is what entertainment/hospitality media like. But there’s really no excuse for typos – too many apostrophes in VIP’s and mannequin’s, not enough apostrophes in venues, Savile Row spelled wrong, no cap A in Fifth Avenue. Yuk.

Well, readers, it’s nearly Halloween and here’s a press release with a ghoulish spelling mistake right up there in the headline. A major candle manufacturer announces its

“frightenly fabulous candles”.

It’s “frighteningly”, you morons. Oh, and candles “cast” a ghoulish glow; they don’t “caste” it, as your top tips for creating a romantic ambience would suggest.

There will be a ton more crap Halloween press releases arriving soon. I feel it; I sense it. I am on full alert.

Pic credit: S Fenton

Inhibit/prohibit, flout/flaunt – and another missing apos

Following a recent trial involving indecent behaviour, the accused was given a 10-year sex offenders’ order. This order was said by one paper reporting the case to “inhibit some behaviours”. Well, it’s possible that it will, but surely they meant “prohibit”?

Similarly, a review of the film Sex and the City 2, which was on telly last week, described how the characters “flaunt” local custom with their embarrassingly vulgar behaviour while on a visit to Abu Dhabi. One can imagine them flaunting – they’re extremely good at that – but they certainly weren’t doing it to the local customs; the word the writer was grasping for was “flouting”.

That one was in the Sunday Telegraph, which should know better. I don’t know if the ST is one of the papers currently sacking sub-editors so that pages can be produced for tuppence ha’penny by 12-year-olds thousands of miles away, but if so, that would explain why such an error was overlooked.

Meanwhile, I laughed out loud when I saw the possessive apostrophe had been missed off the promotional leaflet for a new “kids snack box” for young holidaymakers. The Gatwick airport food shop offering this “kids” treat is called…  Apostrophe.

Pic credit: Ambro, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1499

Too posh to swear: and getting a warm glow in Waitrose

The Pet Peeves thread of the writers’ forum I frequent has now been going strong for an astonishing four months and has passed the 3,000-comment mark, with peeved journos and eds popping up all the time to add their rants about mis-used words and bad grammar.

One of the things that’s been enraging them recently is the irritating use of “less” when “fewer” is meant, and vice versa.

Just as greengrocers’ apostrophes drive the pedantic to distraction, so does supermarkets’ use of “less” (as in “10 items or less at this checkout”).

I remarked that I’d got such a warm glow on seeing the correct “fewer” used in Waitrose that I vowed to shop there again. The grammar-deficient Morrisons, I added, with its insistence on “less items” and its missing apostrophe, could bog off.

This prompted an enquiry from an American as to whether I meant “bug off” as he’d not heard the expression before.

Two other forum members told him no, that was right; bog off is a British English expression. One said I was deliberately making a play on words, what with the supermarkets’ use of “bogof” (buy one get one free) promotions.

Actually, she’d credited me with being more clever than I really am, as this hadn’t occurred to me.

I did learn something new though; “bog off” derives from “bugger off”, according to www.wiktionary.org. Another source, www.urbandictionary.com, offers this amusing definition: “a word upper-middle-class kids that are up their own arse use to say ‘fuck off’ or ‘piss off’ because they are too posh to swear”. This definition cites “Bog off, Dave, stop humping my leg” as being an instance where bog off might be used.

This said it so much better than I could have done, so I threw this definition into the discussion. One of our resident pedants immediately pointed out that that it should read “…kids who are up their own arses”.

Pic  credit: Tungphoto, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1708

My spelling goes from bad to wosre

It was embarrassing enough to spell embarrassing wrongly in the recent spelling test, but things took a turn for the worse when I had a request late in the afternoon to write a book review for the local paper (“any chance of it by tomorrow?”).

I’d just finished reading a PG Wodehouse for the zillionth time and I can bang on endlessly about how great Wodehouse is  – luckily the Surrey Mirror didn’t mind which book I chose – so I got down to it and turned out the required number of words before bedtime.

On more than one occasion in the Jeeves & Wooster stories, Jeeves refers to his simple-minded employer as “mentally negligible”. In repeating this gentlemanly insult I managed to spell it as “neglible”. I noticed it on re-reading what I’d sent and sent apologetic correction blaming the tight deadline. How apt though – who’s the mentally negligible one now?

And I thought I could spel!

Just took an online spelling test on www.peopleperhour.com. It’s one of various tests you can take to show your proficiency in various activities. The results then get posted on your profile to show how good (in theory!) you are at what you do.

40 spelling questions. I scored 98% (or 39 out of 40), which isn’t at all bad, especially since I whizzed through them all in 10 minutes, but at the time I thought I had them all right. I have a nasty feeling I put too few Rs in embarrassed. Appropriate, really, as that’s what I feel.

When mocking people’s spelling mistakes stops being funny

There are gangs of self-appointed spelling police who lurk about on Facebook looking for errors. Their aim, according to the link below, is to “publicly challenge and humiliate sloppy wordsmiths”.

The Best Obnoxious Responses To Misspellings On Facebook | Happy Place.

Happyplace.com collated loads of examples of Sloppy Spellers meeting Spelling Pedants online, and some are quite amusing.

On the other hand, some of the spelling police are effectively trolls, since they set out to bait and denigrate rather than to educate – and they appear to be targeting complete strangers in order to make their points.

But some of the exchanges contained in the link are really very funny.

+ One pedant remarked on a badly spelled post: “There are no correctly spelled words in your message… perhaps you have an involuntary movement disorder in your fingers.”

+ Another spelling troll took exception to being called a “dooshbag”, and kindly supplied the correct spelling so that he could be insulted more accurately.

+ “Margerhitas make everythuing betterr”, commented one poster, only to get the rapid response from a lurking troll: “Except spelling”.

+ Another troll wittily responded: “What a gneiss father” to a Facebook user who said her father had told her never to “take anything for granite”.

+ There was an amusing exchange when someone called Rachel announced that she was “board”. A troll wittily responded: “I’m chalk, we should get together”. Rachel sniffily replied: “BOARD. Like I don’t have anything to do. Not BORD, like a chalkbord.” Rachel went on to suggest that the troll should “learn to spellcheck”, perhaps inevitably prompting the response: “Oh god, I hope you don’t breed”.

+ And someone called Jesse proudly announced to the world “I past my test!!!”, only for a troll to comment: “I hope it wasn’t a spelling test.”

+ Sometimes the victims bite back: one wrote to his tormenter: “Got nothing better to do than troll pages looking for spelling errors… you probably haven’t been laid in 10 years.”

+ One feisty young woman, named Candace, responded: “Go dig a hole and fall in it” to a post correcting her spelling. The troll pedantically pointed out that if he had dug a hole he would already be in it and wouldn’t need to fall in. “Fine,” said Candace, “go dig a hole and die in it.”

The irrepressible troll replied that if he were about to die he would probably be unable to dig a hole. Candace, who one imagines had already lost interest in this exchange, responded tersely: “Shut up” and the dialogue concluded.

+ There can also be harsh words between those who know each other. One girl, called Nicole, took exception to her partner stating what an “amazeing girlfreind” she was – it wasn’t those spelling mistakes she objected to, but the fact that he spelled her name “Nichole”.

Much to chuckle about, in short, on this link. But I found myself rather dismayed about the way some trolls seek to make a point at the expense of people who appear to be genuinely distressed.

On reading a post saying: “My gurl gav me her pies – dunno wat 2 do next”, some wit suggested he should eat the pies, to which the poster responded: “U nasty ass.. I don’t need this shit..” explaining that he was referring to “bumps on ur dick”.

If the poster genuinely has an STD, the would-be wit of the spelling police is unhelpful and somehow a little cruel.

Other examples go further into the realms of unpleasantness. One Facebook user wrote that his girlfriend had left him, he’d fallen out with his best friend and his grandfather had died. “Its only getting worse,” he added mournfully, admitting “I need help”. A Spelling Troll popped up briefly to point out that he’d missed the apostrophe out of “It’s”. Other trolls also stepped forward to correct the spelling of two potentially suicidal posts, one from a boy who didn’t “wanna live anymo” and the other from a girl wishing “congradulations” to those who, she believed, wanted her to die.

We’ve all been tempted to correct others’ spelling: but there’s surely a line to be drawn; those who should know better, like companies, professional communicators and anyone who’s had a university education, are fair game as far as I’m concerned. But there’s something not quite nice about seeking out and criticising the personal communications of individuals who appear to be in distress, with the sole aim of scoring points.

Pic credit: Ambro, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1499