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
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.