Yesterday I heard three different words used to mean the same thing—two of them wrongly.
The word that everyone was reaching for was tenet. And although one person correctly used the word, his colleagues used tennent and tenor.
And their repeated use of the incorrect variants was such that I was forced to question my own confidence that tenet was indeed the correct variant. It is.
I love Elon Schoenholz’s use of the word and in his review of the Chrome Metropolis bag on the Cool Tools website. (Lovely website, btw.)
Chrome’s Metropolis is expensive, and well worth the price if you live car-light and don’t use a rack and panniers or Xtracycle.
Most people would use the word but after the comma, signifying the high price as a weakness. But, like the positioning of Stella Artois, the and positions the product’s high price in a positive light, alongside well worth the price.
A lovely little device.
The Outlook interface for creating and editing your out-of-office email response is dreadful. In Outlook 2007, it constitutes a text-box four lines high, maybe 350 pixels wide for entering raw, unformatted text. Keep typing and you’ll get a vertical scrollbar.
And the interface does not allow for spell-checking.
The dreadfully constrained interface and the lack of a spell-checker make for out-of-office emails littered with typos and grammatical heathenry, an email that is sent to way more people than any other. I would estimate that over half of those I receive contain at least one error.
Today’s examples:
Please. Copy your email into Word. Read it, check it and double-check it before turning your out of office on. Thank you.
Lots of sites, both professional and otherwise, seem to be using a double-hyphen when they mean to use an em dash. It’s as if they know that they need a long dash, but can’t be arsed to insert one.
The double-hyphen looks hideous, but it’s as if I should give them credit for trying. How about trying a bit harder and typing ALT+0151 (on the number keypad, not the top row). Or if you’re in WordPress (I am, don’t you know), hit the Insert Custom Character button sporting a Ω symbol, having hit the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink button). The em dash can be found on the second row, fifth symbol from the right.
Here you’ll find more on the correct use of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes.
As grammar and spelling standards continue to slide and txt-speak continues to gain prevalence, will demand for skills in grammatical correctness (e.g. proofreading) increase because of the shortage of skilled resources, or decrease owing to the reduced demand?
The space immediately after a link should never form part of the link itself. And the space after a portion of a sentence emphasised via a different fount should never share that of the emphasised portion.
Laziness through double-click and “intelligent” drag selecting gives an outcome that jars. With me at least.
I read with interest and some amusement today’s news of Luc Costermans breaking the world blind road speed record.
My favourite part of the article was the paragraph-hungry BBC’s decision to separate these two sentences into two paragraphs.
Two years ago Mr Costermans completed a tour of France piloting a light aeroplane.
He was accompanied by an instructor and a navigator.
Surely the second sentence is a sufficient qualification of the first to negate the need for the carriage return, line feed.
There are a couple of word pairings that differ by a single letter but whose meanings are completely different.
Encourage: inspire with confidence; give hope or courage to
Entourage: support group
Homophone: one of two or more words with different origins and meanings but sounding the same
Homophobe: one who hates or fears homosexual people
Any other non-trivial examples?
It would be lovely if the plural of apex was apices and if that of annex was annices.
During the BBC’s online Olympic coverage this morning, there was the following update at 10.45:
1045: And we’re off – Sarah Stevenson versus Maria del Rosario Espinoza of Mexico. Can the Doncaster lass keep her head while all around her are losing theres’? The 20-year-old Mexican is the current world middleweight champion, a title she won in Beijing last year.
Fortunately, they “corrected” it quickly to:
1045: And we’re off – Sarah Stevenson versus Maria del Rosario Espinoza of Mexico. Can the Doncaster lass keep her head while all around her are losing theirs’? The 20-year-old Mexican is the current world middleweight champion, a title she won in Beijing last year.
A couple of heinous errors from Ben Dirs, whose name is itself a stroke of genius.
A fabulous article articulating the tension between journalists and sub-editors in the newspaper industry. Lots of sweariness, some beautiful humour and some artistically-crafted, unedited prose. Well worth a read.
A wonderful miscorrection of the Economist by Stephen J. Dubner on his Freakonomics blog on the New York Times website.
In the extract below from the Economist’s London Stock Exchange index, he suggests that pasty should read pastry.
“In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.”
Some research needed before you go correcting people, Stephen.
Now I love the apostrophe as much as the next man, assuming of course the next man is an apostrophe-crazed fool. But there is one use in particular that aggravates the shit out of me: when people head documents Do’s and Don’ts. Or Do’s and Don’t’s. The latter may be worse, with two faux pas, or better as at least it’s consistent. If you have to use the phrase, Dos and Don’ts, please. Thank you.
Lynx’s latest campaign tells us men that “Its good to mix things up”. Punctuation included, it seems.
The above screenshot from the Lynx website has addressed the error, albeit with the apostrophe quite clearly added as an afterthought; the TV is yet to catch up. It reminds me of Cadbury’s Creme Egg slogan, which temporarily read “How do you eat your’s?”
I’ve recently started working on a project in which apostrophes are second-class citizens. In communications, they crop up where they shouldn’t, and they are distinctly lacking where they rightfully belong. The apostrophisation (Look it up! Actually, please don’t) or otherwise of its is a lottery, seemingly unconnected with context; an agenda is pluralised with an errant apostrophe, yet people in possession of stuff are merely pluralised.
Maybe my concern of 1998 that the apostrophe is a dying punctuation mark is coming true. But maybe not, given that it’s cropping up in places it shouldn’t. Hopefully my voting it one of the seven wonders of the modern world two years back will keep its profile sufficiently high to fight off its mis-use, and promote its place in our documents, below the @ sign on our UK keyboards, and below the “ in the US. Long may it reign.
King’s Cross is slowly becoming Kings Cross. More and more establishments, some of them well-respected, are ignoring what I assume is the ownership of the cross by the King, deciding instead to imply an anger shared by a whole host of kings.
The recent movement of the King’s Cross Thameslink connection to St. Pancras has prompted whatever company is responsible to erect associated, apostrophe-free signage diverting its customers accordingly. I genuinely believe the trend is down to ignorance rather than defiance.
It will be another bitter blow to punctuation if and when London Underground adopts the trend, removing the apostrophe from the blue bar across its logo. I’m confident that this move is a long way off.
A John Inverdale quote from tonight’s England vs. France post-match analysis put into question the premise behind its more common opposite:
Now Jonny Wilkinson: you can’t overestimate his importance in tonight’s game.
At first, I thought Inverdale was wrong. Surely he’d meant underestimate, right? But on analysing, it seems he’s right: if I estimate his importance, then the fact that this estimate cannot ever be too high suggests that he performed pretty well.
The counter is that we can’t underestimate his performance. And surprisingly, this is equally valid. But the can’t brings with it a different meaning.
It’s a confusing language.
For as long as I can remember, BBC News has adopted the single-word approach for the word underway. But it seems that it made a conscious decision about four months ago to increase its articles’ word counts and update its styleguide by introducing a space between the previously inseparable r and w. Every article in BBC News now seems to adopt the two-word style, although the odd anomaly slips through. BBC Sport, in its less formal style (particularly in live Premier League updates), is more likely to adopt the single-word style, most likely at the disgust of the house-style police on the news desk.
Some quick searches across the News site show 362 pages of results for the one-word variety, yet only 86 pages for the newly introduced two-worder. In Sport, the two worder has racked up a mere three pages of search results, the more common one-worder clocking up 100 pages.
I expect the News site’s results will close up over time, while Sport will retain its defiant imbalance.
My strong preference, for what it’s worth, is for the conflated variety. Thanks for listening. I say! Hello? Is anyone there?
The Clapham branch of Hamptons the estate agents underwent a revamp just before Christmas. Its new sign is shown below.
I’m always amazed that important signage gets through basic proof-reading with mistakes. Maybe the period after Lettings (and the lack of a corresponding one after Sales) sticks out more to me than to other people. But nonetheless, it’s something that should have been picked up in the proof-read, particularly as this is the only text on the sign.
Nice font though (Georgia), and well done on the phone-number grouping.
I use the ALT short-cuts in Word and emails to make sure that my em and en dashes are correct (ALT+0151 and ALT+0150 respectively). It’s slightly annoying that in my font of choice (Georgia 12-point), the em dash seems to be a pixel taller than its sibling characters, shunting down a smidgeon the line of text which it graces. The result is, I’m sure, more noticeable by me than by my limited, highly appreciated readership.