{"id":854,"date":"2012-03-04T15:34:21","date_gmt":"2012-03-04T20:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=854"},"modified":"2012-03-04T15:34:21","modified_gmt":"2012-03-04T20:34:21","slug":"english-suffers-the-slings-and-arrows-of-outrageous-punctuation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/english-suffers-the-slings-and-arrows-of-outrageous-punctuation\/","title":{"rendered":"English suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous punctuation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Grammar<\/a>There’s a chip wagon<\/a> in town that offers “fresh cut fries.” When I see that sign, I always wonder what “cut fries” are, and how they compare with uncut fries. Does this chipster offer stale cut fries as well as fresh ones?<\/p>\n

The former library is becoming an old building. The sign in front tells us a “senior facility” is coming soon. Sad to see a relatively new building forced to age.<\/p>\n

A sign in a local department store advises me “video’s” are on sale. A grocery store offers “mango’s” and “avocado’s”. These common ‘apostrophe catastrophes<\/a>‘ can be seen daily on signs and in official documents pretty much everywhere English is misspoken. <\/p>\n

I was warned to “drive safe” when I left a store on a blustery winter’s day. I responded that the safe didn’t have an engine, so I could not possible drive it. When told to “dress warm” I asked “dress a warm what?”<\/p>\n

A local restaurant calls itself the Olde’ Towne Terrace<\/a>. Aside from the inappropriate apostrophe dangling at the end of the word, olde<\/em> was a correct spelling in earlier forms of English, but not today. As this sites<\/a> notes, it’s just an affectation today: “Other ways of pretending to be ancient are the addition of unnecessary ‘e’ at the end of words, ‘olde’, ‘shoppe’, again a holdover from Middle English where the ‘e’ was pronounced… fake English spelling affects all parts of the English-speaking world.”<\/p>\n

\"Toonpool\"<\/a>I suppose I’m urinating against the wind here. There are hundreds of sites and blogs dedicated to documenting and correcting the tsunami of improper spelling, punctuation and grammar all around us. My protest is a mere ripple in comparison. Some writers offer constructive correction (like Melissa Donovan<\/a> in Writing Forward), but people don’t check before they make signs. It strikes me the job of creating those messages is always assigned to the least literate employee.<\/p>\n

There’s the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks<\/a>, a Flickr collection<\/a> of signs with bad grammar and spelling (and not just at Tea Party rallies, either!) and another set here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Canada’s favourite coffee shop annoys me daily with its incorrect punctuation: Tim Hortons (sic). According to Wikipedia<\/a>, this error was actually a conscious decision: “The chain’s first store opened in 1964 in Hamilton, Ontario, under the name “Tim Horton Donuts”; the name was later abbreviated to “Tim Horton’s” and then changed to “Tim Hortons” without the possessive apostrophe. The business was founded by Tim Horton, who played in the National Hockey League from 1949 until his death in a car accident in 1974.” <\/p>\n

Why, you ask, would any<\/em> company deliberately dumb-down its signs and open itself to ridicule? To appease the anglophobes in Quebec<\/a>: “Some older locations retain signage with the company’s name including a possessive apostrophe, despite the fact that the official styling of the company’s name has been Tim Hortons, without an apostrophe, for at least a decade. The company had removed the apostrophe after signs using the apostrophe were considered to be breaking the language sign laws of the Province of Quebec in 1993. The removal of the apostrophe allowed the company to have one common sign image across Canada.” I can only feel for the franchise owners who stubbornly refuse to give in to corporate silliness. The company will offend millions of English language speakers by making an egregious error in punctuation, but not anyone in Quebec. Nice message<\/a> to send the rest of us, eh? Seems the missing apostrophe has even spawned boycotts<\/a> of the place and petitions to have it restored.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Collingwood Council has not gone the way of Birmingham, England<\/a>, and declared apostrophes outdated on its signs. I treat this declaration with the same reverence I treat my dog barking at a squirrel that eludes it: pointless and annoying. Birmingham has become the “city where apostrophes arent welcome<\/a>” and ridiculed for the decision in the media.<\/p>\n

If you don’t think punctuation matters, read this story<\/a> about a comma that cost Rogers $2.13 million!<\/p>\n

Does all this matter any more? Is the number of people who care about language usage, about punctuation, grammar and spelling dwindling, fighting a losing battle against tweets and text messages? I fervently hope not. Even some Chinese cities<\/a> have undertaken campaigns to correct English on their signs. If they care that much about English, surely we, its native speakers, should do so, too.<\/p>\n

Maybe Canada needs a National Punctuation Day<\/a> (Sept. 24) or a National Grammar Day<\/a> (March 4) like the US has. Would it make any difference? Aside, that is, from giving geeks like me something else to whinge about?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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There’s a chip wagon in town that offers “fresh cut fries.” When I see that sign, I always wonder what “cut fries” are, and how they compare with uncut fries. Does this chipster offer stale cut fries as well as fresh ones? The former library is becoming an old building. The sign in front tells us a “senior facility” is coming soon. Sad to see a relatively new building forced to age. A sign in a local department store advises me “video’s” are on sale. A grocery store offers “mango’s” and “avocado’s”. These common ‘apostrophe catastrophes‘ can be seen daily \u2026 click below for more \u2193<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[73],"tags":[78,75,82],"class_list":["post-854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-grammar","tag-grammar","tag-language","tag-punctuation"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":true,"total_views":16068,"today_views":0},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":881,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions\/881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}