AIBU to tell an Etsy seller their grammar/ punctuation is incorrect?

[Lolabear38]

Looking at signs on Etsy earlier and one I noticed said ‘Dog’s welcome’. Obviously dogs doesn’t need an apostrophe here - looking at other items in their shop I also noticed things like ‘mum’s are magic’ and some others. I messaged the seller about something I wanted to buy but mentioned the incorrect use of the apostrophe - in a polite, what I considered to be constructive way - and got a very arsey reply!

Apparently they have ‘hundreds of very satisfied customers’ (and actually they have had hundreds of sales according to their Etsy stats) and nobody has ever complained before, therefore it must be me who has the problem and I should probably look at other shops if I’m going to be ‘a perfectionist about it’.

AIBU to have pointed this out? I genuinely don't spend my days seeking out grammatical errors to correct but why are people blasted for trying to help like this? I'm not claiming my own grammar or language is perfect, but neither am I selling signs with mistakes on them. It seems like anytime someone does point out mistakes they're labelled 'grammar police' and demonised.

YABU - you should have let them carry on using apostrophes incorrectly and looked at another shop instead.

YANBU - you were trying to help 🤷🏻‍♀️

Depending on the circumstances I think sometimes these errors do need to be pointed out (speaking as a former teacher and sub-editor), but in a tactful way, as many people on here have advocated. It's important in a professional setting (I was once thanked for pointing out 'accomodation' on a large poster in an estate agent's window - thus embarrassing my husband!). But sometimes people just haven't got the hang of the written language. Some are dyslexic, some are not native English speakers. Sometimes it's just a typo. Some people just don't care.
My favourite glaring example of a huge mistake was on several large illuminated temporary signs through roadworks in the Milton Keynes area last year, which requested drivers to 'PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY TROUGH VILLAGES'. They were there for months!

Your waisting your time bcos you except everything 2 b perfect and people’s should be aloud to brake the rules sometime as long as the meaning is plane.

I wouldn't have bothered in that situation OP. The majority of people buying stuff like that would neither know not care. What REALLY pisses me off is the shocking standard of SPAG in newspapers, books, magazines where someone has been paid to produce that material. Why does none of this seem to matter these days?

What is a covid Christmas decoration haha

You should have just asked to have it personalised without the ‘. No point in telling someone their craft is shxte

Brilliant 🤣

Brought up

I was tested and am slightly dyslexic. Believe it or not, it ensures I check more thoroughly, and it doesn't affect my knowledge of the rules.
I used to send my boss emails correcting her awful grammar and punctuation as she was sending out professional emails. I got tired of it in the end as she absolutely never learned

Yanbu
Thus is her business and even if she didn’t agree or change a polite response would always be good.

My SPAG and punctuation are rubbish because it was not corrected at school. You wouldn’t know that from any important document though because I know that and proof read/get others to.

I do hate some of the condescending comments on here generalising about “the type of people” buying the signs (??? My grammar here). There is nothing wrong with these signs. I find them twee but lots of people don’t and it doesn’t mean that they are thick. A lot will be moving on to but the same sign from someone who cares more about spelling or grammar.

@purplebunny2012 your boss? that’s a bold move! 😁

It's that kind of relationship. She used to be "just" a manager

You did a good thing!

Thank you!

It was on a sign giving information to the public.

I have been getting irritated by these 's everywhere for I think nearly 20 years! What the hell are they reaching at school? We learned this at the age of around nine. Plus we were in deep trouble if we got it wrong by the time we were in year five - although it wasn't called that then, I just missed that.
My other flights of apoplexy are over the the number of people who cannot get the following right:

there their or they're
and for me the most unforgivable error;
'must of' or 'could of' or 'should of'

I can tolerate the odd wrong 'their/there' when it's most likely a typo and the spell corrector has put it there anyway. Plus I do understand we get mental blocks especially when we are emotional about something or in a hurry or self-conscious about writing to a public forum.

But these kinds of fundamental errors are becoming almost normal they are so frequent now. It makes me wonder how people think. Because there is a logic behind the meaning of the words according to how they are spelled or how the 's is placed.

Then, regarding this Shop Keeper's ungracious response, I would say it simply underlines that making an error on a public sign is not important to her. A real sign of the times (ugh) that she thinks it's not right to kindly tell her she's shown herself up as an ignorant fool. She obviously thinks she's so clever she does not need to know the difference between a dog's ... (add your own word here) and dogs (plural).

If it were me, and maybe I could just make a mistake like that (oh no!) if I weren't too well or... no, I just couldn't. Maybe I could make a spelling mistake on certain double letter words... (but I'd check...). Well, the way to respond is to say. "Thank you, I didn't notice my stupid mistake! How kind of you to bother to let me know and save me further embarrassment. I'll fix it!"

Sorry, I have just seen my typos. I've an excuse, but am embarrassed. I can't see very well. It's worse at this time of evening. But I should have checked more carefully. Sorry.

I easily believe you purplebunny2012 [love purplebunny brings back memories]. I have mild dyslexia, but nobody looked into it. I just had to look up spellings a lot and pray in exams that I'd not write anything terrible. I may not have dyslexia as such, because I became much better after I learned to speak French. It may have given me confidence, I think. But I did another degree when I was in my 40s and it involved essay-answer exams and I got a first so somehow I managed. I have a nearly photographic memory but not for spelling.

But I easily beieve how good you are. For one thing, I used to teach a teenage dyslexic boy. He'd done all the dyslexia program but I was just supporting him with his GCSE subjects, taking him on his own. He had a brilliant mind! He 'saw' what he learned like maps in his head which is what I do but someone had told him it was stupid. His confidence was nil. Also he was faster at using a dictionary than I and as I am always using one I'm quite fast.

I like the way dyslexic people think. Also I worked with autistic people and loved being with them.
Sorry if this is off topic I'm really saying no disabiity excuses public signs being spelled wrong or being gramatically wrong. People who face challenges in learning have shown me that they can be better at getting these right than many children who have no disabilities.
Now I've got to stop because I can't see what I'm typing - so sorry for any typos.

Just remembered one more pet hate. When people say "somethinK or anythink "
I'm not talking about Liverpool or Birmingham pronunciation of the 'g' at the end.

But worse... I have seen it written as 'some think' as in 'There was some think wrong with the way this was handled'! That was on an essay by a first year University Undergraduate.

I probably wouldn’t have but good on your for pointing it out and just put it out of your mind. Perhaps she’s ordered in 500 Dog’s welcome signs and feeling miffed

once, in Dublin, I saw a sign outside a newsagent for “New’s papers”. It was about 35 years ago and the thought still makes me wince.

Not very good for business to be so rude.

I agree with others in this case it’s ok, although I would have just shopped else where personally. But then I’ve been abused for pointing out things to sellers before. So now I just buy the product I want from a seller who can spell

Maybe Lilly is the owner, so it’s Lilly’s florist?

Maybe a dot/full stop is too little to get annoyed about, but whenever you see groups of initials used in signs, on vans, letterheads, adverts etc., I'd say it's the case 90+% of the time that the last one is missing. For example, 'P.J.R Plumbing Services' - as though the eponymous tradesman can work out that the first two letters are abbreviations for Paul and James, but not that the R is short for Roberts.

My DS had an official (government-sanctioned) test yesterday, where they were expecting the answer 'a dice'. Thankfully, his teacher was competent enough to acknowledge that his answer of 'a die' was 'technically correct' (no 'technically' about it, mind - you wouldn't say that 2+2 is technically 4, but 5 is also correct as it's close enough); but I can well imagine that a great many teachers wouldn't actually know the proper correct answer.

The problem is that SPAG was dumped and widely disparaged long enough ago that the children who were the victims of this are now the new generation of teachers, who quite naturally don't have the faintest idea, as it was considered 'better' that their own errors were never corrected.

Marshmallow is another one: I'm never quite sure if most people think that it's spelled 'mallow' but pronounced 'mellow', or whether they genuinely believe 'marshmallow' to be a weird spelling error.

I also find it ironic that many, many people will seek to ascertain (or even declare) the correct 'pronounciation' of a particular word.

Maybe Lilly is the owner, so it’s Lilly’s florist?

Then where does Gilly come into the equation?! PP has already clarified that the business is called 'Gilly's Lilly's'.

I've just done a search for it and discovered that the owner of the business is actually called Julie!

So who are Gilly and Lilly? Unless Gilly is a kind of 'pet' pronunciation of Julie; or maybe the business name 'Julie's Lulie's' was already taken by somebody called Julie who 'belongs' to Lulie?! The plot thickens.

Lol. A couple of years ago I went to Boundary Mill (big outlet store). Large sign advertising POLO SHIRTS - but the ‘s’ was missing from ‘shirts’ 🤣

I don't mind being referred to as the spelling or grammar police because I was taught that both are absolutely essential.
During the pandemic, I regularly saw signs outside supermarkets, telling us to "Que Here".
It drove me crazy!
I pointed it out at Customer Services every time I went into the stores, but evidently no-one at any of the big supermarkets thought it important enough to correct the signs.
Granted, the pandemic was clearly more important than a spelling mistake, but it wouldn't have hurt for someone to correct it.
In the end, I actually printed some "Please queue here" signs myself and took them to the supermarkets to replace the incorrect ones. Some stores swapped the signs and used mine, some didn't.
Obviously, I couldn't force them to put up correct signage but I felt better knowing I'd made them aware of the fact that we're not all illiterate.

www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/fife/4129720/kirkcaldy-library-sign/

His teacher may have been competent enough to recognise that both are perfectly correct. I suppose it begs the question: when does a language item that's considered archaic become so archaic as to be no longer correct? It seems with "die" as the singular of "dice", that horse has already bolted. At least, among experts and dictionary writers.

www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/dice

dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dice

"Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) says: “The small cubes with faces bearing 1-6 spots used in games of chance are the dice (pl.); and one of them is called a dice.”

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language sides with Fowler’s: “Dice is etymologically the plural of die, but the latter is virtually no longer in use (outside the fixed phrase The die is cast), with dice reanalyzed as the lexical base: another dice ~ a pair of dice.”

Interestingly, it looks like "dice" is etymologically older than "die" and then, as is usual in language shift, "correctness" moved from one to the other (for the plural) for about 500 years.

Good to hear the government (sanctioned document) weren't, after all, wrong though.