It's Nothing Short of an Apastrophe...
May. 18th, 2011 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorsetgirl.
I was thinking only this morning that the world needs a new word. It's quite clear that many people simply don't care about getting their apostrophes in the right places, but I feel each error, and it hurts.
So I invented a new word. APASTROPHE - blatant misuse of apostrophes, causing damage to my brain (mild), and the writer's credibility (catastrophic).
I had originally intended to post a simple rant about this example, found on the website of my children's school:
"What areas of your childs learning would you like [the school] to focus on in the future?"
Ooh, I dunno, how about ... grammar and punctuation? YOU'RE A GRAMMAR SCHOOL, PEOPLE - GET YOUR OWN RIGHT FIRST!
And then I did some googling for something completely unrelated and came across this horror, which I simply had to share. Somehow the red text makes it even worse:
And finally, in the course of logging on to the parents' area of the school website, I was shocked to find that they hate me even more than I thought they did. I've never seen this screen before, and I can't say it makes me feel very welcome:
(btw, if you consider I've made any grammatical errors here - feel free to point them out, politely, for my mortification and your daily schadenfreude. I like to discuss and learn.)
I was thinking only this morning that the world needs a new word. It's quite clear that many people simply don't care about getting their apostrophes in the right places, but I feel each error, and it hurts.
So I invented a new word. APASTROPHE - blatant misuse of apostrophes, causing damage to my brain (mild), and the writer's credibility (catastrophic).
I had originally intended to post a simple rant about this example, found on the website of my children's school:
Ooh, I dunno, how about ... grammar and punctuation? YOU'RE A GRAMMAR SCHOOL, PEOPLE - GET YOUR OWN RIGHT FIRST!
And then I did some googling for something completely unrelated and came across this horror, which I simply had to share. Somehow the red text makes it even worse:
And finally, in the course of logging on to the parents' area of the school website, I was shocked to find that they hate me even more than I thought they did. I've never seen this screen before, and I can't say it makes me feel very welcome:
(btw, if you consider I've made any grammatical errors here - feel free to point them out, politely, for my mortification and your daily schadenfreude. I like to discuss and learn.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-23 05:20 pm (UTC)Ow, that one really hurts.
You may know better than I do when and why schools stopped teaching such things, but I do remember working with a bunch of top-notch young management consultants in about 1995 - they would have been born around 1970 - and although they were extremely impressive in their ability to step up and lead a team at a moment's notice or make a presentation to senior management off the cuff, none of them could actually write a sentence that didn't make them look uneducated. (They couldn't actually have run a bath, much less an operational department, but they certainly talked the talk).
Do tell which pub?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-26 02:30 pm (UTC)It was in the 1970s, and it was for the reasons you say in your post below - so as not to stifle children's creativity by worrying them with spelling and punctuation. Personally, I think these things need to be drilled into children in Junior school, so that by the time they need to do extended writing at secondary school or university, it's ingrained, and they don't need to think about it.
Do tell which pub?
It's the Von Alten, on the way to the next town. Von Alten was a real life person in the Napoleonic War, and the sign shows someone of that era, so I assume that's who it was named after. Then a new sign appeared on the front - 'Von Alton' - while the original 'Von Alten' remains on the side. Bugs me every time I walk past. It's been closed for a while, probably karma.
I remembered another apastrophe (great word!) the other day. The local Sainsbury's a while ago had a post box 'for our customer's convenience'. I kept wanting to ask if they only had one customer, but they probably wouldn't have understood.