Pedants' safe-house

[oldbutgold]

In view of the strong feeling expressed towards inveterate error-spotters (aka passive-aggressive bullies/pedants/twats etc) what about a thread for all the spelling errors/grammatical mistakes seen stricly outside MN in RL?
Like journalist Keith Waterhouse who was president of the AAA - campaigned throughout his career for the Abolition of the Abhorrent Apostrophe.
Spotted by self recently:

Ladie's hairdressers (in town)
Childrens' Society (on BBC)
10 items or less (everywhere)

(i see what you were doingm Ps - i tried to miss out letters in mine to show that tht was the emphasis (or the reverse of emphasis) of the first that.

oh think I get it now, thanks nb

he said that
that THAT (some word somewhere, maybe on a sign)
that that man had...

I think that's all the punctuation it needs, nickelbabe. I think I will start a 'underline and bold ought to be acceptable punctuation' campaign

we could try again, properly, with missing letter and bolding....

He said tht that "that", tht that man said was correct.

i think.

Bucharest, we want more!

And I need some help with my tenses
Maybe a nice neck massage

You beat me to it, nickelbabe - that's exactly as I understand it.

italics can be used to show emphasis, too.

(and in typing, they're often shown by underlining the words so that the editor knows to make them italics when s/he types them up)

This is much better than those silly nintendo braintraining games!

(can't be arsed with capital letters- my little finger hurts too much when i press the shift key)

OK, here's a spelling riddle for you. What perfectly normal, everyday word is written below?

Ghoti

Show your workings!

it's the past perfect!

I know the ghoti one, don't think I had a clue first time round!

i know that one!!

Gh in enough is ffff
O in women is ie
ti in station is sh

so it's fish

lol at your little finger hurts, my DH has a poorly toe at the moment

[cat's bum face]

Too fast!

does that stop him typing?

too fast - i had a blinking customer!!!

i had to tell her to wait a second so i could do the riddle!!

according to wikipedia, (i googled, i chose the first result...), plupefect is normally called past perfect in english and it's from the latin plus quam perfectum more than perfect.

that explains why it's Plusquamperfekt in German (pron plus-kvam-perfekt)

and it's pluperfect normally in french.

i think pluperfect is fine to use in english though.

[lightbulb]
they are the same thing

I use pluperfect in English (it's plus-que-parfait in French)

It's a lovely tense

nickelbabe thanks for that link.

My lot love that series of books - have about 4 of them and devour them frequently. It makes me really proud that they are all turning into bookworms like me (DH has not read a book since leaving school and I was worried about who had the dominant reading gene!)

Hang on, what's pluperfect? Like, 'had had' instead of 'had'? So a kind of past tense with bells on?

I remember the ghoti one too, it's one of George Bernard Shaw's little tricks.

You were all right with the had hads.

I usually do it thus:

"John, where James had had (as in "had written" or "had used") "had had" (past perfect tense) had had "had" (past simple) "had had" had had (as in "had received= been given") a better result from the teacher.

I am also semi-colon/colon illiterate, I tend to use a colon if a full stop would also be possible. Is that right?

The that one is easier. "He said that (relative pronoun) that (demonstrative adjective) "that" (irrelevant whether RP or DA) that (RP) that (DA) said was correct.

I use these sentences in conjunction with the different pronunciations of "had" as a main verb or auxiliary verb and likewise "that" as an RP or DA.

My comma example is to ask students how many sisters I have in each of these sentences.

My sister, who is a nurse, works at the hospital. (I have only one sister- the commas surround extra information which is not vital to the understanding of which sister, because there is only one)

My sister who is a nurse works at the hospital. (I have more than one, but one of them is a nurse, without the nurse information we wouldn't understand which sister I was talking about)

Those 2 examples had a nasty doctor student make me cry once. My innocent little example had him screeching at me that I was a racist/facist and thought British people were superior to southern Europeans like him. Just because he didn't understand my commas. Diddums.

Now, if someone can give me a complete and brief set of rules for prepositions...I have 2 uni students at 4 o'clock who have an exam of 2 hours on Monday, solely on the use of prepositions, and beyond telling them "it comes with time/use/experience of using the language" I don't know where to start.

an obstacle course??