My Semi-Annual Rant

image from cbc.ca/arts

Everyone who knows and loves me knows my phobia of spelling and grammar mistakes. I made a typo in an email to my husband recently and it's been bothering me ever since. So, here, I take umbrage with a plaque on a newly unveiled statue of Emily Carr in Victoria that has flipping typos--yes, that's typos pluralized-- because someone missed a letter and hyphenating two words. The article expounds the virtues of spellchecking and asks why it wasn't caught there. I ask how the proof even got to the plaque-maker with the errors still extant: does no one read things before or after spellchecking? Does no one own/use a dictionary? I loved someone's online comment on the article: Don't be so harsh towards a country were English is a second language. [sic] Touché!

Comments

Batman said…
Your concern with punctuation – admirable. In fact, worthy, timely, and apposite. These cretins should not be let off the hook. Their mistakes are not 'typos' - strictly speaking, mechanical errors in composition.

These mistakes betray a sloppy mind. And speak to a broader trend: the waning of facility in written English which now seems the norm in our society. The easy availability of the SpellCheck function on our digital boxes is a snare and a delusion: it gives false assurance to the people who composed this plaque: 'know' is indeed spelled correctly. It's just the wrong form of the word.

Stay on your high horse, Vanessa. And with your tart tongue and flying fingers, charge into the melee, and slay the incorrect and inexact.

Love the blog. And I agree completely about Lindsay Lohan.
17 October 2010 at 12:32
Beautiful Feet said…
See you in the kitchen, Batman.
17 October 2010 at 12:36
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

But There IS Joel Kinnaman...

Image
ALT: Joel Kinnaman as Tak Kovacs in a dark, strange world, wearing a blue coat and shirt; he's looking around in wonder. Oh god, I didn't know whether I could get past the first episode: I love dystopian futures, but this seemed hackneyed...  Altered Carbon has the feel of sometimes The Hunger Games , sometimes Harry Potter , often Repo! The Genetic Opera or Gotham City or Narcopolis .There's martial arts, comic booky treatments, digital effects and story content. Some of it is dumb, and the names for things in the future are lazy: The Array is the internet, a sleeve is a host, ONIs are basically smartphones, Poe is like TNG's Data, Meths are the 1%, and paying my chip-implanted fingers is technology that's already here. The "strong, independent woman cop" is the lamest character attempt/trope out there, and the actress is terrible. The producers seem to be trying to appease audiences on every front rather than trying to make a solid, consistent produ
Read more

Lilith is Fair

Image
Just wanted to highlight Maihyet Burton's store Lilith as it has changed location since I last mentioned it. This funky clothing (et. al.) store is now in Studio 103 of the Case Goods Building of the Distillery District, 55 Mill St. And Buttoons buttons are still being carried there! She and partner Denis Taman Bradette also have a very funky thing going on with the Warmings Project , part artistic endeavour, part environmental/social activism which assumes a post apocalyptic language and visual reference for Ontario should our land be decimated by our climatic abuses. They express this creatively through their photography and imagined mythology. I'll let her blogs express it better : "The hope is to voice the urgency of climate change through the development of a body of work that interconnects art, design, sustainability, education & literature....On 150 acres of scarred, previously clearcut land in Hunta, 100km north of Timmins, they plan to develop a Refuge for th
Read more