A snap of the lunch menu at the nearby cafe the other day. I draw your attention particularly to the entry a little over halfway down the board.
oh my goodness, somebody give that chicken a blanket!
Weep, my friends, for the dumb is winning.
new improved edition!
Yesterday I spotted the following on an invitation to a baby shower:
you know, it almost works...but not
Eggcorn? Malapropism? Both?
Definitely funny, definitely wrong.
6 February 2009 @ 8:48 | 5 Comments
and this isn't even high-density living
Lately, all my mornings start the same way: I lay in bed, listening to the sound of my neighbour throwing up. First time it happened was a weekend, and I wondered (not without some satisfaction) whether it was him, suffering the after-effects of too much alcohol. But it's been going on for over a month now, so I'm pretty sure it's her, suffering the after-effects of impregnation.
It is possible to know too much about your neighbours.
To entertain you, I will direct you towards The Grammar Blog. I can't quite remember where I came across this blog, but I'm always up for a bit of syntactical geekery (hey, it's part of the job description, 'kay?), and at the moment there's a post featuring eggcorns.1
Fair warning, there's an embedded mp3 in the blog post, but rest assured, it's two DJ's talking, so nobody is going to assume you've visited an unsafe site. They are going to know you've tuned into (gasp) grammar radio, though.
- Must admit, I'd never heard of an eggcorn, and would probably have called any eggcorns I heard a malapropism. [↩]
30 January 2009 @ 18:05 | 4 Comments
re-known
What is it about cafes? Are they pathologically incapable of hiring staff who can spell? I've stopped counting the crimes against apostrophes (its/it's usually takes a real beating in a cafe menu), but this one was new to me:
do you think perhaps they meant renowned? because being renowned is very different from being known, forgotten, then re-known
10 December 2008 @ 8:00 |
all of these hours, they will add up to a day
Sometimes I think my metaphors require more research than the rest of my novels' worldbuilding put together. It can be tricky, in a first draft, to hit a metaphor which is in keeping with the worldbuilding but at the same time not so unwieldy that a modern reader is going to stumble over it. Yesterday I spent a good twenty minutes researching the history of barbed wire (invented in the 1860's, in case you're curious, so barbed wire itself was out) and chasing mentions of the use of "thorny brush" as a fencing/deterrent which could have provided an analogous metaphor … only to realise that the simple fish hook, which has been around since time immemorial and requires no fancy descriptions to be understood by any reader, was a far more apt metaphor for the situation.
Um, yeah. This is how I spend my time. Willingly.
11 November 2008 @ 12:21 | 2 Comments
for the roses were weak and the petals fell away
Focus. I lacks it.
Walked out of the house this morning with the nagging feeling something was wrong. Odd. Misplaced. It wasn't until I got to the top of the driveway that I figured out what it was: the letterbox was missing. Uprooted and vanished in the night. I stood there bemused for some time, staring at the ground where it used to be, utterly failing to see where it now was or even the hole where it used to stand, wondering if perhaps I'd been insane and only ever imagined a letterbox standing there.
In the end I found it across the road, thoroughly dismembered, but neatly stacked. I suspect the people who did the stacking were not the people who did the dismembering, but who can say. It's a strange world.
In other news, one of my colleagues at work keeps a list by her computer of malapropisms1. Who doesn't love malapropisms? I used to know a girl who always used the phrase "to all intensive purposes", which always made me laugh. My colleague's list has a couple of other pearlers, including "oddviously" (what the…?!) and "taxi ranch"
I'm quite fond of the idea of a taxi ranch. I can't help but picture acres and acres of brown plains grass, with happy taxis gambolling about in the fields… herded by ride-on mowers…
- which she's labelled malappropriatisms [↩]
8 November 2008 @ 9:45 | 4 Comments
my predictive library refuses to remember deb
The Alien Onion reports on a new trend wherein "book" evolves into meaning "cool", which I am linking both because I find the evolution of the english language a fascinating process, and because my publishers really do rock.
Lately, my brain appears to be fixating on txtspeak and lolspeak. For example, the dinner discussion last night centred for some time around whether we could discern a kiwi accent in the sender's choice of spelling, or whether we were making it up.1 I've spent a good part of the last week training Spawn in lolspeak.2 Also, I appear to have degenerated entirely in my own standards. A lolspeak habit, I has one.
I wonder if my brain is working on a story about language that I don't know about yet.
- I think we were making it up. I was more interested in the way the language was evolving so that this sort of unfixed and flexible spelling was not only accepted, but becoming the norm. [↩]
- What? She's young, and adaptable, so it won't scar her (too much), and I think it would be hilarious if she greeted her father with a tilted head and the phrase 'O RLY?' [↩]
1 November 2008 @ 7:52 | 5 Comments
because commas count, kids
Dear coffee shop next door to where I work:
May I suggest you examine the (lack of a) comma on your sign? I'm not going to harass you over the issue of the serial comma: it's something only writers and editors quibble about, after all. But if you want a list, then please use a comma after "public".
Because the phrase Serving the public hospital staff and visitors actually means something quite different to what you intend.
Or at least I hope it does. If you genuinely mean to tell me you're serving up hospital staff and visitors to the public, then I for one won't be partaking of any of your sandwiches in the future.
Quibblingly,
Me
(Also: Your prices are exorbitant. That is all.)
18 November 2006 @ 8:28 |
that, that and which
Glenda Larke has started a Sunday Writing Tips feature on her blog. Last week she focussed on the perils of the word "that". This week, she's explaining the difference between "that" and "which".
4 June 2006 @ 12:05 | 3 Comments
Possessive Verbs
At the moment I'm studying for a diploma in editing and book publishing. (If any of you have noticed I don't tend to post on Fridays, that would be because it's course day, and the course is in Sydney.) Yesterday's course notes included an article, Rules for Using the Possessive with Verbal Forms by Mary Stoughton. Read more »
27 August 2005 @ 16:37 | 9 Comments
