While celebrating Christmas with family in a small Ontario town this past weekend, I ran across countless examples of misspelled signs, inappropriate use of apostrophes in what should have been plurals, random capitalization of Important Words and other affronts to word nerds. Sadly, I did not have anything with me to capture them for your amusement. But here are some other random misspellings from my “glad I didn’t let that one go” files:
- the shear volume of information (sheer)
- tighten the reigns on spending (reins)
- can eek out a competitive edge (eke)
- additionnal information (additional)
- allows buyers to peak inside (peek)
- wheel barrels (wheelbarrows).
And lest you think I only look with a critical eye, here are some examples of expressive writing that I found delightful:
- “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” – Nicholas Carr in Is Google Making Us Stupid?
- “Occasionally I’ll either be tuned into my local NPR station, KCRW, at exactly the right time…or I’ll fall down some Internet rabbit hole…” – Colleen Wainwright
- “Mostly, I herded actors from room to room — I was a border collie for the comely.” – Quinn Cummings in Notes From the Underwire (a funny book, by the way).
What amusing, enjoyable or painful writing have you seen lately?
2 Comments
Ha! “A border collie for the comely.” That’s awesome. I had no idea Quinn Cummings was so smart and funny and accomplished. No wonder she had to give acting the heave-ho.
Oh! And her wikipedia entry brought up another pet peeve: it’s “casting *director*”, not “casting *agent*”. (Yes, I wrestled with my inner grammar nerd before placing the comma and period where I did. The pressure of leaving a comment on a blog like this!!)
Colleen, thanks for commenting! Don’t worry, I leave commenters a little slack when it comes to grammar; it’s the big companies who should use a proofreader that are shown no mercy! And your own line is awesome itself. I love that image of falling down an Internet rabbit hole, because it happens to me all the time.