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)

yes, typing errors or punctuation mistakes are fine when you're just "talking" like this, but if you're making an advert, or an article, or ANYTHING that will be seen by the public, or by its intended audience, it should be checked and it should be CORRECT.

i know edam, i shouldn't worry, but i refuse to believe it's a lost cause yet.

I do correct the BBC.

can't wait till they start saying "a pride of lions are..." and see Terry's mailbag fill up.
because it's basically the same mistake.

nickelbabe you put it so much better than I could. Thanks.

(not a pedant ignore mistakes)

I want to know something please. On something like strictly come dancing when they announce the people going through to the next round. Is it, the next couple to go through are or is?

It's misused homophones which irritate me. The most common one I see is "discrete" for "discreet", but there's also the horrid "chest of draws" for "chest of drawers".

or chester draws

Could of, should of, would of. Each time I read one of these I kill the poster in interesting ways in my mind.

People using affect/effect in the wrong places is another mistake that drives me crazy.

aw, misused homophones make me laugh (not their/there/theyre or your/you're, they do still irritate!)

plane and plain

but i think that's more because we used to do funny/amusing exercises on them when i was at school.
our teacher handed out leaflets that had the sentence with the wrong homophone in it and a picture of the wrong homophone so that we would all laugh and then learn the correct one.

Can I play? My current pet peeve is the disappearance of 'sliver'. The whole world seems to say 'slither' now to mean a small slice under the mistaken apprehension that 'sliver' is a sloppy pronunciation. A 'slither' of cheese; a 'slither' of bread. It drives me BERSERK!

There is an advert on TV for an electrical suppliers that shows a room with a TV that changes throughout the decades.

Then a warning comes up at the bottom of the screen that a new ariel may be required.

I can forgive the odd greengrocer writing APPLES' but a multi-million pound advertising campaign?

with discreet and discrete, it's weird, because you really don't know which one they mean!

i mean, our belly-dance teacher typed up a dance routine for us using a veil and she put "hold the veil discretely" (obviously Word spellchecker which doesn't take into account context), so i had to ask her if she meant hold the veil with hands wide apart or hold the veil so noone can tell that's what you're doing.
once we'd done the dance, it was obvious which she meant, but not when readin through the text.

Otterley - that's great, i love it! (was tempted to put Grate to make an amusing pun, but i was worried it might have been mistaken for bad english...)

Oh slither/sliver - that's a good one. Bring back "sliver" campaign, anyone?

Where do you lot stand on "should of"? Of course, written as such it's all wrong. Comes from people saying out loud "would've" for "would have". So when someone says "would've" and it sounds like "would of", it is a fine line between correct and incorrect pronunciation.

I feel that whilst we are training our children to speak properly, we ought to avoid saying "would've" out loud, as the youngsters may misunderstand and begin saying "of".

LOL at 'Guilt-Head Bream'. hehehe Heehee

And the other day on another board which shall remain nameless but which I believe saves its users a great deal of money, I read that person x was at person y's 'beckon call'. 'Beckon' is the verb, beck the noun.

Otterly -I think the sliver/slither thing grates so much, because it's a hypercorrection (like "he talked to my husband and I.") - it's a toxic combination of incorrect grammar and snobbery....

Snobear - i like that idea.
in fact, i think i do normally say should have in speech.
i'm just sitting here saying "i should have done that, I should've done that, I should'ave done that, I should h've done that" to see if i could hear a difference!

Bronze - I'd say the next couple is because a couple is one unit therefore singular. But they next couple are wouldn't bother me particularly, as there are two people in a couple.

(Think about 'a pair is' or 'a pair are' - you'd say 'is' wouldn't you?)

""a leopard can never change it's spots" would be correct." NO. It's always = "it is".

There are two reasons for apostrophes:

1. To indicate possession. "Jane's book". But there is an exception -- pronouns do NOT take apostrophes for possession. This is because pronouns follow rule no. 2:

1. To indicate contraction, aka a missing letter. "They're going" = they are going.

Plurals do NOT take apostrophes.

Here's my rule of thumb for apostrophes:

One dog, two dogs, one dog's dinner, two dogs' dinners BUT its dinner, their dinner, whose dinner?

Ah, do we get near to the dialect v. incorrectness debate with 'should of'? Is it mere laziness/lack of understanding or a valid use for speakers of some dialect - Estuary?

The funniest one I ever saw was at graduation when I was working at a major Russell Group university, and someone in administration had put up a massive printed banner (must have cost over £1000) across the front entrance saying "[RG University] congratulates it's new graduates"!

Someone else had climbed up and painted over the apostrophe

I've just finished a novel in which every page has something like:
'he left early to pick the children up' or
'she finished her coffee before turning her computer off'.
Now, when I were a lad(ette) we were taught something about split infinitives (can't remember exact rule) so:
'he left early to pick up the children' or
'she finished her coffee before turning off her computer'.
Grated so much I couldn't enjoy the book.

There's no real reason not to split an infinitive - it's just a silly thing the Victorians made up because they thought that Latin was beautiful and since it is impossible to split an infinitive in Latin we shouldn't split them in English.

Would you really want Captain Kirk's mission to be 'to go boldly...'?