Here’s a small collection of links that deal with common and annoying English errors. There are lots of laughs waiting in the link pages, so please have a look.
And before you accuse me of being an obsessive-compulsive, anal-retentive twit, I should mention that a) I am an English teacher, and b) I am well aware of–and very comfortable with– my hyper-attentive, nitpicking tendencies;-)
Some links I have recently come upon deal with misspelling, others with improper punctuation, and still others with disgraceful word usage. There are even sites that deal solely with everyday misunderstandings, botched pronunciation or oxymora (not necessarily errors, but amusing nontheless;-). Here’s one for general word oddities, and another which focuses on funny and/or incomprehensible English found in Japan.
(To balance things out, here’s a site dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in tattoos.)
Happy reading.
Technorati Tags: learning, language, education, japan, teaching, strange, rants, quotes, humor
9 responses so far ↓
John // April 4, 2007 at 7:54 pm |
http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/
Kelly // April 5, 2007 at 12:54 pm |
I remember the funny English on tee shirts in Japan. Also the English instructions on my friends Kubota tractor were pretty funny.
lillizen // April 5, 2007 at 3:03 pm |
Thanks a lot, Steve!
There are so many cool things in your blog.
I’ve enjoyed it a lot. I’ll come by for a visit every now and then…
Cya!
Lilli.
lifebeyondsixty // April 6, 2007 at 8:08 am |
It’s a bit coincidental that you should post these links just now — at lunch yesterday I was leafing through “The Dictionary of Disagreeable English” which has a common objective of pointing out common linguistic goofs.
As language teachers, we always have a fine line to tread between old-fashioned prescriptive usage and modern, constantly evolving usage, even when the modern forms are clearly based on some kind of misuage. The best example I can think of is “I could care less.” That always gets me: how could the user not realize what he/she is saying?
I’ve also noticed a increasingly common misuse of THEN meaning THAN, and often c oming from well-educated people who really should know better. Too frequently these days to be mere typos.
Perhaps one great boon to non-spellers would be to introduce the SCHWA as an actual letter of the English alphabet. Teachers could give students credit for correct spelling if the student can perceive that a particular vowel falls in an unstressed position. How that for the spelling reform proposal of the century?
Well, it’s still a fairly young century . . .
realityonastick // April 6, 2007 at 9:02 am |
John: Thanks for the link. Nice article there.
Kelly: Yes, I think the funny English phenomenon is one that is here to stay. Most businesses don’t seem to care too much about mistakes in their English advertising and company literature. It’s not worth it to them to pay extra to have it written by a proficient native speaker–which is fine by me, because we have non-stop comedy surrounding us over here;-)
Hey Lilli!: Thanks for stoppinng by. I’ll check back in at your blog again soon, too:-)
Jim: ‘Could care less’ has been one of my pet peeves, too. It’s right up there with ‘a whole nother’ in my book. When I was in college, one of my supervisors used to say ‘irregardless’ all the time. I would tune out everything he said at that point and have this philosophical discussion with myself about whether working for an ignoramous made me an ignoramous too;-) In the end I decided that they weren’t paying me enough to take orders from a dufus!
Miss Behaving // April 10, 2007 at 10:38 am |
under the heading of ‘disgraceful word usage’:
The other day on Larry King Live, his guest was talking about having a telephone conversation with someone drunk.
She said, ” I don’t know what he was saying, he was so drunk, his voice was ILLEGIBLE” .
Tell me I am not mad! I have heard it before too, is it a current fad or just clueless people??
realityonastick // April 11, 2007 at 1:07 pm |
Miss Behaving: There’s no fad with ‘illegible’ as far as I’m aware. She probably wanted to say ‘unintelliglible’ but that doesn’t really matter because she was using words she’s not comfortable with on national television, which is a big no no. Chalk it up to yet another case of someone trying to sound more intelligent than they really are.
Re-reading my comment, and the original post, I can’t help but laugh at the irony in the fact that I spend all day everyday telling my students that it’s OK to make mistakes and that nobody minds or cares much!
Monica // September 15, 2007 at 3:37 am |
Cool entry and links. I will bookmark your blog, but on this entry, shouldn’t “chinese” have a capitalized “C” to read as “Chinese?” Also, I believe the word “tattoo” was misspelled. Other than that, thanks for the links!
{m}
realityonastick // September 15, 2007 at 5:31 am |
Hi Monica,
The lower-case “C” was not my doing. I copied that from the website. Nice catch on the misspelling of tattoo, though. Feel free to point out any other mistakes you come across, and I’ll get them changed right away:-) I used to spend more time going over posts to check for errors, but it was slowing down my productivity.
Oh yeah, and the blog has just moved to a new domain. See the most recent (and final) entry on this site for details. Hope to see you at the new url.
Cheers,
Steven