Friday, May 9, 2008

A saltine battery

I've added a new category to my blog today. The "me being a self-righteous git" tag will be reserved for posts that deal with my single greatest literary bug-bear -- those people who stuff the written English language into a sack, tie off the end and proceed to kick thirteen shades of crap out of it, inspired by nothing other than complete ignorance of what certain words look like.

For example, yesterday I saw, on one of those school signs with the slide-in letters, the following message:
GOOD LUCKT OUR DEBATING TEAM

One might argue that the T had slipped slightly to the left, but what happened to the O? And how did it slip, when the whole message was locked behind a quarter-inch-thick sheet of perspex?

And then, this very morning, on a newsblog comment page, someone wrote this gem:

One hour is long enough, little lone eight.

Clearly the creators of these sentences know what said sentences should sound like, but haven't ever seen them written down.

I fear that this won't be the last of these posts.

2 comments:

lili said...

Poor little lone eight...

My favourite recent example of stupid people not understanding stuff was at the Logies last week, when the various presenters kept saying "[insert random TV celebrity] is the John Wood of the Logies".

Nobody seemed to understand that JOHN WOOD IS THE JOHN WOOD OF THE LOGIES.

james roy said...

Recent game-show moment - a woman was asked, "What is short for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation?"

Her answer? "NASA."