i can't not notice this stuff

Here's a malapropism that made me chortle all day yesterday:

"…in other words, the [object] is [a thing], as succinct from [that other thing]"1

Succinct? SUCCINCT?

OH, MR ATTORNEY. YOU MEAN DISTINCT.

Now, I'll grant you, there's a passing aural resemblance on account of that -inct suffix business, but I don't care to admit that as a valid excuse for gettin' it wrong. Not when we can safely assume that the author of the sentence in question passed not only primary and secondary education levels but also some (usually respected) form of tertiary education. Surely, somewhere along the way, he learnt the difference between a word that means clearly distinguishable and another that means concise?2

  1. Boring technical terms have been changed to lovely, bland, non-identifying labels for the sake of, you know, keeping my job. [↩]
  2. And after writing the above, it occurs to me that the attorney, after all that schooling, probably has dreadful handwriting or is Far Too Busy and Important to waste time writing and typing his own letters, so he probably has them transcribed via dictation and a legal secretary. But you know what? I'm not cutting that secretary any slack either. Secretary at least passed high school, secretary should know better. And the attorney should proof-read his correspondence. [↩]

Country Road / Another Brick In The Wall / The Gambler (Carbon Leaf — Live)

28 November 2009 @ 6:29 |

new improved edition!

Yesterday I spotted the following on an invitation to a baby shower:

you know, it almost works...but not

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.

  1. 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

a glimpse of banality

As a brief addendum on the when can I buy it? issue, I am reliably informed at least one store is talking about December 19 as the on-shelf date. Make of this information what you will.

I have spent most of the weekend pondering the pc vs mac dilemma, and am no closer to an answer. I suspect I desire a MacBook for three very important reasons: the pretty, the Scrivener, and the avoidance of Vista. But are these enough to make the switch? H'mm… I have researched the word processing options available on the Mac, and am not thrilled with iWork's Pages inability to save in rich text format as a default option. Exporting a file all the time? Bugger that for an idea, if you'll excuse the vernacular.

Anyway. While I'm sure the inner workings of my mind, and my inability to make a snap decision, are of the utmost interest to you all, perhaps I'd best move right along, eh?

Unfortunately for the lot of you, there's very little to move on to, my free time at the moment being entirely consumed by the novel revisions, so I will leave you with an absolute corker of a malapropism I discovered today (but cannot find again now to link to or take a snapshot of) buried in the reviews of apple's time capsule:

It's an ascetically pleasing addition…

15 December 2008 @ 19:03 | 7 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

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 |

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…

  1. which she's labelled malappropriatisms [↩]

8 November 2008 @ 9:45 | 4 Comments