First of all, two tips I found out recently:
- In Excel, if you click CTRL+1, it brings up the Format Cells dialog box (spelling here is fine btw, as it's a programming term as opposed to an Americanism)
- If a dialog box appears on the screen, CTRL+C will copy the text from the dialog box on to the clipboard for you to paste wherever you want.
The first of these saves inordinate amounts of time when you're doing similar repetitive formatting. (On a related point, identical formatting can be repeated using F4.) The latter is very useful particularly when testing, as error messages can be pasted into the body of the bug instead of having to attach screenshots - wicked.
Secondly, there are two grammatical errors in songs, both of which make me both cringe and laugh (wonder what that looks like to fellow commuters). One of them I believe is quite famous, the other less so:
- Elvis Costello, Oliver's Army: Oliver's Army is here to stay, Oliver's Army are on their way
- Black Eyed Peas, Where is the Love: Negative images is the main criteria
Both of these suggest that they may know they're wrong. Elvis uses the correct verb conjugate first time round, but fails on the second. It's not even as if is (and its) would affect the scanning. With the Black Eyed Peas, maybe they've tried to use negative images as some form of group noun (illegally I might add), but then they get on to a mistake that more and more people seem to be making: criteria is plural (should that be are plural?); criterion is singular. If only Barry Took were still alive to write to at Pebble Mill.
Are there any more musically grammatical pedants out there? Any more instances to tell us about? I thought not...
