Grammatical Errors In Public

I'm the kind of girl who tends to pick up very quickly on other people's spelling and grammar errors (though perhaps not so quickly on her own). It's becoming quite an obsession, but I have a feeling that as writers many of you are likely to pick up on these things to.

Sometimes it quite outrages me that no one seems to have a basic understand of which words should be used in which context and how to use basic punctuation. No one ever seems to know that "its" indicates possession, and "it's" indicates the lack of a space and an "i"...


I picked up on about four punctuation errors in the supermarket the other day, when I was only in there for about five minutes.
In a second hand furniture store I read a sign that said, "Deliveries in Tuesday's only" Tuesday's only what??
And I recently texted into Kerrang!'s digital radio station to yell at them for saying something about texting "u're" messages to their number.

That one really got to me, as they had decided to use text language, fair enough, but had used text language for the wrong your/you're (with an apostrophe) even though the full length version of the correct your/you're had the same number of characters!!



Ok, so throw in your own rants about the "world of official business"'s complete disregard for use of proper English!!

I am horrible at grammar. I am so bad at it that I try not pick at other people's mistakes as I'm not too good at it myself. one thing I noticed which I thouhg was sort of ironic.

It's becoming quite an obsession, but I have a feeling that as writers many of you are likely to pick up on these things to.

[u][i]

You used the wrong to. Probably a typo but I found this really funny as you went on to say how people don't know th difference between it's and its. I was thinking to myself, does she know the difference between to and too.

I'm sure you do.

I noticed thyat most people on the internet use horrible grammar.

I once saw a sign - can't remember what exactly was wrong with it, apart from the fact that it was grammatically incorrect - I just found it amusing that it was in a library.

I saw a truly hideous one the other day. I was in Delia's shopping with a friend (Delia's is a clothing store for teenage girls) and we were looking at their t-shirts.

One shirt said, "Put trash in it's place."

I stared at it for the longest time trying to figure out if it was a play on words or something. But apparently it was just a shirt designed by an idiot.

I'm tempted to either 1) write to them or 2) never shop in that store again.

Cade: Write them something witty and powerful. They'll feel the stupider for it, and you the better. ^_~


There was a sign in a local pizza place that was incorrect. I forget what it said, but I wanted to jump over the counter and change it.

They tend to bother me too, especially when surfing the internet though. When visiting business or such important sites, one would think their grammar and punctuation would be close to correct. My dad is VP at his own job, and he gets all over people when they make simple typos or use incorrect grammar/punctuation because it's a business site and they have to look professional.

*two cents*

Ugh.

I am obsessed with finding grammatical errors in novels. I mean, come on! Novels? Editors would surely have found them.

It surprises me that I find a lot of missed commas, and even some mispelled words. i.e. it's instead of its or vice versa.

Yeah. It bugs me.


-Jared

BigBadBear wrote:It surprises me that I find a lot of missed commas, and even some mispelled words.

Actually, commas are notorious for screwing with people. Everyone has their own take on 'em, and usually whenever they think there's a grammatical error involving commas, it's really just a matter of opinion.

There was a garage near me that had signs saying DON,T and CCJ,S. Kiled me each time I saw them.

There's a sign in Biology that says 'Cleaner's please don't spray directly it kills the fish' and someone had circled the apostrophe. It made my heart sing. I never found out who it was though.

They forgot to put the apostrophe in our school's name on the signs, like, if our school was called Saint John's, they wrote Saint Johns, so one of the teachers went around and changed them all

I once saw a sign proclaiming they sold "Strawberry's"... it bugs me.

Yeah, now I remember the safety contract we had to sign to participate in Bio labs...it was riddled with errors. It was horrible.

My favorite typo ever was on our agenda for an NHS meeting. It was talking about signing up to tutor and it said "We especially need tutors who speak a second language for students who do no speak English."

Yo no speak ingles? Tu no hablas English!

Okay, that was random, but it reminded me of a very strange sign my friends who went to Spain over break saw near the airport. It said "Yo Vuelo, Tu Fly, and Everybody Vueling". Yo Vuelo=I Fly. It was pretty funny.

You're right, though. Seeing people mess up things like apostrophes is really annoying.

mizz-iceberg wrote:I am horrible at grammar. I am so bad at it that I try not pick at other people's mistakes as I'm not too good at it myself. one thing I noticed which I thouhg was sort of ironic.

It's becoming quite an obsession, but I have a feeling that as writers many of you are likely to pick up on these things to.

[u][i]

You used the wrong to. Probably a typo but I found this really funny as you went on to say how people don't know th difference between it's and its. I was thinking to myself, does she know the difference between to and too.

I'm sure you do.

Ha. Yeah I do... Thought that might happen actually - should've checked before I posted.

I can't stand Sureal because of that. I cringe every time I see his 'I Are Riter!' *Cringe* I can't believe I typed that... At least he uses correct grammar in posting, though.

I find errors in books constantly. It's fun.

I'll keep an eye out, and let you guys know when I find more. I see them all over the place, but try to put them out of my mind so I can sleep at night.

~JFW1415

I remember seeing a typo in Harry Potter.