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)

Could well be, I've forgotten! You don't actually need to know what it is in order to function in society, so I can't get worked up about people calling them PIN numbers.

(Sakura, I think it's the fact that the contraction of "it is" sounds exactly like the word for something "belonging to it" that is the problem! But English is full of words that sound the same with different meanings, that's why we have Thesauruses.)

Thesauri

I'm sorry I haven't made it to the end of the thread yet, but wondered what you thought about "Record's Day", the title of an episode of Lazy Town on CBEEBIES!!!!

Really - shall I write in?

This one is rather unfortunate...

I was reading the Grauniad's report on Derek Bird. They started that he abandoned his car at a dead end in Boots. I was thinking to myself that it was surely a strange place to open a chemist, in the middle of nowhere... But then realised that they meant the village of Boot

Lazy Town should be banned simply on the basis of scary characters with stretchy faces, let alone any disservice to the English language.

Thesaureesi

Yes, PIN is personal identification number, I don't believe you can all yourself a true pedant if you don't care what it stands for

I've just remembered 'here! here!'

I might as well out myself as an ex English teacher, so ground down by correcting 'definately' over and over and over and over again that it played a large part in my decision to leave the profession.

That sort of thing can literally drive you crazy. Yes, literally!

[settles in]

I had to peel my third sign off the wall at nursery the other day - splodgy toddler artwork of palm trees, blue seas, golden sands etc, labelled 'We have been painting pictures of dessert islands' [sigh]

(The previous ones were 'Green Pea's' and a handmade alphabet chart showing K for... knife)

Isn't it lovely to be able to pedant (can it be a verb?) to our hearts' content without being pounced on.
Can anybody print off a few T-shirts? Tee-shirts? What message shall we put on the front(s)?

Ooh, may I join? I try to avoid showing my annoyance at things like this in RL, but my inner pedant seethes.

One of DS's books talks about 'sailing the sea's of old'. If children?s reading books can?t be trusted to be grammatically correct then what hope is there for the future? [despairing emoticon].

I knew I?d read something about an apostrophe after an abbreviation not being completely incorrect. From ?Eats, shoots and leaves? (Lynne Truss):

?Only one significant task has been lifted from the apostrophe?s workload in recent years: it no longer has to appear in the plurals of abbreviations (?MP?s) or plural dates (?1980s?). Until quite recently, it was customary to write ?MP?s? and ?1980?s? ? and in fact this convention still applies in America.?

I have thrown English language textbooks away here in Italy because of apostrophe abuse.

Could anyone settle an ongoing argument here? I do English lit as well as lang, and the (Italian) teacher I work alongside insists that Shelley (Percy Bysshe) is pronounced "Shilley". She is so authoritative on it (to the point of saying to the kids "Buch says "Shelley" but ignore her, it's actually "Shilley") that I've sucked it up

I'm prepared to be wrong, but would love so much to be right, if anyone knows...

I am genetically incapable of spelling caterpillar correctly. (I used a spell check then)

MrsBadger, wouldn't you like to be marooned on a dessert island?

what crazes me is terrible errors in children's books, totally confusing for little ones.

Like the "sharing a shell" book by Julia Donaldson, which both dd and I love, apart from the "scaring off all the fierce fishes " bit, arghhh

Recently I bought dd a little activity magazine to keep her busy on a 4hour drive and every now and again she'd ask for advice, like "mummy, it says here that Sarah's phone is broke and..."
I didn't believe her, I kept arguing until she showed it to me!!!

Tiggy, DS 2.2 calls it "capertillar", it's so cute I almost don't want to correct him

Oh no, just clicked on a link from another thread and was confronted by "FAQ's".
Not sure if I can order from them now.

lunatic it was the a not the sprinking. I hadn't spotted that one, but I like it.

People can correct me all they want. I love these threads but know I'm crap at this grammer malarky. sic

Bucharest I have never heard 'Shilley'!

This is the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary entry and you can play the sound - Shelley in both Br and Am Eng. It's published by OUP. However, others may know better re 18th/19th century linguistics.

SAkura:

"He = his ( he's) = The man's
She = her (not her's, in this case) = The woman's

It = its = The cat's

So 'its' is just a completely different word to 'it' (like 'his' is different to 'he') and it's just a coincidence that it sounds exactly like it? "

basically, yes!
and like she is different from her and hers.
and like they is different from their and theirs.

each acts as its own word.

just think if you don't name the thing, then don't use an apostrophe

oh, and just to add to it:

me, my, mine - exactly the same, different words.

oldbutgold
'he left early to pick the children up/
'he left early to pick up the children'
(Ages ago in the thread - bottom of page 3 but I felt a pedantic need to comment.)

These aren't examples of split infinitives but trailing prepositions.
A split infinitive is putting an adverb (or a phrase) between "to" and the rest of the verb, the oft-quoted example being: "to boldly go".

The trailing preposition is found at the end of the sentence, and is often considered to be stylistically clumsy. (Like the split infinitive rule, I think it's one of those throwbacks to Latin).

I agree the examples you quoted are sloppy. However, sometimes it is easier to put the preposition at the end to avoid mangling the sentence. Winston Churchill famously complained about the usages of prepositions in a written report submitted to him, stating:
"This is the sort of English up with which I will not put".

MrsBadger...K is for knife - did you mean N?

i don't think she did - i think she meant that it's pointless to go K is for Knife, when the children at that age are learning the sounds of the letters, so they'll be led to believe that K is nnnn
when it probably could have gone K is for Kite so they knew that K goes kkkkk

put
instead of go and gone

Jesus, what's wrong with me???