The Grammar Vandal

Okay.  Two things:

1) I am sick of people adding the suffix “-gate” to every catastrophe, disaster or scandal: most recently, Spygate (the Patriots spying on other teams or something like that; I detest football, so I’m not following the story) and Bittergate (Barack Obama’s comments on Pennsylvanians feeling bitter with George Bush).

And it becomes even more gauche in other situations.  One that sticks out in particular is Lifestylegate, which happened a few years ago on American Idol when Mandisa prefaced her gospel song with a speech about how your lifestyle shouldn’t hold you back from God, thus alienating her LGBT fans, and she had more gay fans than any other Idol to begin with (she was the big black diva!), so that wasn’t a smart move, and she got eliminated shortly after, but I have a point, I swear!  LIFESTYLEGATE?  No.  Just no.

It was called WATERGATE because that was the name of the building!  Don’t attach -gate to every scandal!

Secondly:

I’m watching the news on Fox right now.  Not Fox News — the local Boston affiliate (mostly because I just finished watching American Idol.  Go Cookie!  Also, the battery in the remote died a few days ago and I’m too lazy to get up and turn the TV off).

Anyway:

The anchor said a sentence along this line: “He admitted his homosexuality a few years ago.”

When I took my first journalism class at Fairfield University, I was taught that you need to be extremely careful with the word admit.  This is because the word denotes guilt.  Because of this, you rarely see the word in the news.

Above all, you must never use the word admit when someone says that he or she is gay.  When you use that word, you imply that being gay is something about which one should be ashamed.  Not only does it perpetuate homophobia, it also shows editorialism on the part of a journalist.

Well, it is Fox.

How can this happen?

Have any of you studied journalism?  What is your opinion on this?

My power cord died last week and it has been hellish trying to do anything on my computer with a universal cord (it once took me five minutes to type out a one-paragraph message on Facebook!).  I ordered a new one.

And this is what Dell had to say:

Not totally egregious…

Not the worst thing I’ve seen in the last few days…

But…it wouldn’t kill Dell to invest in a big of punctuation.

Also, I headed to Whole Foods after work yesterday (I absolutely LOVE that it’s so easy that Whole Foods in Charles River Plaza is a short walk from my new office and right on the way home!), not expecting anything but a few bagfuls of organic fruit and some of that FANTASTIC fresh mozzarella that they have on display in the produce section.

And there came the grammar.

I saw a sign near the register that mentioned how Whole Foods does work EACH DAY to help people living with HIV/AIDS.  The sign, however, said EVERY DAY.

I was so surprised and happy.  It seems like everyone just says EVERYDAY lately.  It’s gotten to the point that when I see EVERY DAY instead of EVERYDAY, when meaning EACH DAY, I become giddy.

That shouldn’t happen!  I shouldn’t be expecting the worst!!

It was correct.  After all, it was Whole Foods.  This is the grocery store featuring more expensive and healthful food, and therefore likely attracts a highly educated clientele.

It made me happy.

And then I saw the sign on the back of the register, facing the customer:

MAY WE VALIDATE YOUR PARKING TICKET

No question mark.

Aw, and to think it was so good…

I would love to see a business free of grammatical errors.  It would be even better if it were a chain.  And who knows?  Maybe that’s one of Whole Foods’s goals.  These signs were handmade and exclusive to the Charles River Plaza store.

I’ll let you know if I find anything else.

This image is classic!  Check it out:

Source: Facebook, Good Grammar Is Hot group

Remember how your first grade teacher taught you to leave large enough spaces between words?  It was with incidents like this in mind.

That would be the pen is mightier than the sword, Mr. Connery.

Well, the Stuff White People Like blog has added its 99th entry: grammar.

It turns out that, in addition to study abroad, Barack Obama, coffee, bicycles, Arrested Development, multilingual children, organic food and David Sedaris, white people like grammar.

Considering that this blog could pretty much be called Stuff Kate Likes, I absolutely knew that this was coming.

When asking someone about their biggest annoyances in life, you might expect responses like “hunger,” “being poor,” or “getting shot.” If you ask a white person, the most common response will likely be “people who use ‘their’ when they mean ‘there.’  Maybe comma splices, I’m not sure but it’s definitely one of the two.”

And what of the people who actually correct grammar?

Another important thing to know is that when white people read magazines and books they are always looking for grammar and spelling mistakes. In fact, one of the greatest joys a white person can experience is to catch a grammar mistake in a major publication. Finding one allows a white person to believe that they are better than the writer and the publication since they would have caught the mistake. The more respected the publication, the greater the thrill. If a white person were to catch a mistake in The New Yorker, it would be a sufficient reason for a large party.

I’m not going to lie — if I found a mistake in The New Yorker, I would experience a huge burst of emotion.  Not of pride, however — of anger.

That is DEFINITELY taking it too far.

My power cord died this week, so I bought a temporary universal cord that I will return to Best Buy within 30 days for a full refund once I get my official Dell cord.  Because I’m using a universal cord, my computer is VERY SLOW.

Combine that with a sudden lack of internet access and I am nearly hysterical.  I called my friend Lisa just to whine over the phone that I didn’t know what to do with myself.  So I watched RENT on FX and sang along absentmindedly as I played Solitaire.

Seriously, what did we do before the internet?

Great picture, huh?  Thanks to Ryan and Andy, both of whom sent me this.

I JUST got the internet back, but it’s a really slow connection from somewhere in the neighborhood.  I hope I’m able to post this tonight.

It’s been a crazy past few weeks, and I have a few announcements.

Most significantly, I quit my job.  My last day is tomorrow.  Those of you who heard my first NPR interview, you probably caught the “Well, actually…I would love to do this for a living, especially since I’m looking for a new job!” at the end of it.  That was back in July.

Job offers did pour in after the interview and the Globe feature, but they were mostly out in the suburbs.  I did a few interviews but turned the jobs down — it’s really important for me to be downtown, especially since I’m moving to the Back Bay, one of Boston’s most famous and upscale neighborhoods, this September.

(Besides that, I realized that I wouldn’t want to be a full-time editor — it would be too isolating for me.  I need to be able to exchange ideas and collaborate while at work.)

I continued searching for jobs in town, got a few more offers, and turned them down as well.  (Not going to lie — a few famous companies, including a major search engine and a presidential candidate’s company, turned me down.)  Nothing quite fit, and I wasn’t going to settle for anything.

And then I was presented with an opportunity by one of my favorite bloggers, the Missus.  We’ve been reading each other’s blogs for several months now (funnily enough, she originally read Kate’s Adventures, not this one!), and when a job popped up at her company, she told me about it.  A few weeks and interviews later, I got the job.

I’d rather not go into specific details, but I will say that the work is really interesting, the industry is huge, I’m a fan of the company’s product, the package is terrific…and it shaves about 15 minutes off my commute!

I start on Monday.  I’m very happy and excited about it.  (I’m also sad to be leaving so many fantastic colleagues at my current job.)

More posts will appear once I get my computer back to normal.  Have a great weekend!

I’ve been an avid speller since I was quite young.  Spelling was one of my favorite subjects (besides geography) when I was little, and I was thrilled to be included in the accelerated spelling program from when I was seven years old.

That being said…

I was unable to spell the word “margarita” until I was 17 years old.

The reason?

I grew up in the Boston area.

People mock the Boston accent.  Most people say that I don’t have a Boston accent, but at the same time, they’re expecting to hear Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.  Even within the region, there are several dialects of the Boston accent.  While my parents and other family members all have thick Boston accents, they’re from the North Shore — mainly Lynn and Revere.

(I often joke that every single member of my family except for my sister and me has spent time growing up in Lynn.  There are very few exceptions.  For background, Lynn was one of the few Boston-area cities allowing abortions, inspiring the rhyme, “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, you never come out the way you went in, you ask for water, they give you gin…”)

People from Lynn and Revere don’t talk like people from Dorchester and Southie, except that they omit their R’s.  Seriously, you should come to a family gathering of mine.  And when the family members are around, the accent thickens.

(Personally, I live in the city now, but whenever I head home into the suburbs, I think that the accents kick into overdrive.  I always hear much more of a Boston accent among the older crowd on the North Shore than I do among the younger crowd in Boston.)

Therefore, there are three words with which I never enunciate the R: margarita, watermelon and drawer.  Mahgarita, watahmelon and drah.

It’s for this reason that I didn’t know how to spell the word “margarita” until I was 17 years old.

That being said, I hope you had as many mahgaritas as my friend Esther and I did, although we were unable to get into the Cactus Club.  Happy Cinco de Mayo!

You’d think that Urban Dictionary would be one of my mortal enemies.  This is a site where anyone can create a word, define it and put it up for review.  It’s like Wikipedia, only it’s for words.

Well, to be honest, I kind of like it.  Even though most of the definitions are crap, it’s very easy to spot the crappy ones.  And some of them are very useful.  In fact, I admit that I actually used the Web site to learn what a number of disgusting sexual expressions actually meant (like a D.S. and a C.S. — but THIS IS A FAMILY-FRIENDLY BLOG and I will not go into any further detail than that!).

My friend Lisa added the word crarty, which she coined with some of her classes:

crarty
A combination of the words “crazy” and “party,” denoting a festivity that is beyond the normal party level status.
“We’re having a crarty on Friday night! Get pumped!”

(I love the word and have started using it in my daily speech, though it isn’t exactly conducive to those with Boston accents!)

I decided to add bingo arm, which is currently under review with the editors.  I have to give my co-worker Caroline credit for this.  I was telling her about my recent trip to Foxwoods, when I won $92.50 in a mere six hands of Blackjack, and I told her about playing high stakes bingo.

She then started talking about all the old ladies who play bingo and are fat and have their cellulite shaking everywhere.  I laughed and demonstrated how they would frantically scream and wave their arms whenever someone yelled out, “BINGO!”

“Bingo arm,” Caroline said simply.  I thought it was a common expression until I realized that nobody else knew what I was talking about whenever I mentioned it (like here).

Here’s what I submitted to Urban Dictionary:

bingo arm

A flabby upper arm that jiggles when you raise it and move it around, not unlike the arm of an overweight senior citizen who spends all her free time frantically waving her hand at the bingo table.

“Don’t wave while wearing a short-sleeved shirt or people will see that you have a bad case of bingo arm.”

What do you think?  Love it or lose it?

My friend Lisa, a.k.a. the First Year Teacher, went to New York for the weekend.  She’s a grammar stickler in her own right and she took a few pictures of errors that she found.

Check them out:

This particular sign is fantastic for our amusement because the errors are so plentiful!  Which one is worse: the usage of the fake word lite, the hyphen in ice-cream, or the redundancy of diet lite?

Ah, comma, you truly are the ugly stepchild of this sign.  If only you had been a colon, a period or an exclamation point!

Also, I have some very exciting news in my life!  There are a few pieces of news, actually.  I can’t wait to unveil it all next week.

Thanks, Lisa!

Every year, there is a page in my high school’s yearbook depicting fake or joke clubs.  During my senior year, my three best friends — Lisa, Alexa and Beth — and I, better known to the school and our town as The Brood, decided that we needed to be one of the fake clubs.

We got our picture taken and we were one of the three fake clubs featured on the page (along with the Breakfast Club and the Santarpio’s Club).  We needed a club description, so I volunteered to write it up.

The first two sentences:

“THE BROOD…scared yet?  Consisting of Lisa ‘I’m high on life’ L., Alexa ‘That’s crazy!’ M., Kate ‘Didn’t I meet you at the coed naked lawn-bowling party?’ McCulley and Beth ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ G., the Brood remains the most formidable foursome of fun fearless females in all of Reading High.”

It was perfect.

Was is the key word.  It was perfect until the editors massacred it.

Aside from changing remains to remians and changing individually to indivisually, each an egregious spelling error, they also changed my sentence structure.  The removed the comma after Beth’s last name and considered that to be a full sentence.

Yes, it’s a long sentence — but it’s not a run-on and it’s not grammatically incorrect.  Why change it?

This was probably one of the first times that I felt passionate about grammar.

I was the performing arts editor of my yearbook, a position given to me on a whim by the advisor, one of my all-time favorite teachers.  Although I had a LOT of fun adding pictures of the Brood to the drama club section wherever possible, after seeing the finished product, my heart ached.

I wistfully wished that I had been a copyeditor instead.  Oh, God, if only.

(Another thing they messed up: my family’s message to me became, “Kate, the years have flown by watching you blossom into a scintillating you woman.”  Young.)

I understand that responsibility of the yearbook falls on high school students.

But…not even a spell-check?

The following picture was snapped by reader Lindsey of Just Browsering:

Location: McDonald’s, somewhere in California (I believe)

You know, this makes me think about the effect that McDonald’s could have.  If a company as large as McDonald’s (or Starbucks — though Starbucks is losing the golden touch) made an effort to use perfect grammar on all signs, we might notice eventual long-term effects.

Of course, they’re supposed to be doing that anyway.

Hmmm.  There’s a bit of a hole in the logic…

Spam!

I’ve been getting so much of it lately.  I never had a problem with spam when I was running this blog through Blogger.

It’s the kind with a bunch of nonsense words typed in the comments and then the Web site is a link to some kind of meds or something.

Any advice, fellow WordPress users?

I know I’ve been a bit heavy on T-shirt postings these days, but this latest T-shirt deserves attention.  As soon as I fully understood what it meant, I felt the urge to buy it, just for its grammatical correctness!

Check it out:

At first, I thought it said, “We’re #1.”  That would make it a nice antiquated T-shirt, reminiscent of the past.  But then I realized that I had read the words too quickly, and hadn’t noticed that there was no apostrophe.

The shirt is meant to read, “Were #1,” as in “Used to be #1.”

For that reason, I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS T-SHIRT.

Some of you know that I am a huge geography nerd in addition to being a grammar nerd.  In fact, I’m much more of a geography-phile than a grammar-phile.

Because of my geographic knowledge, I am particularly THRILLED that this shirt includes Northern Ireland in order to form the United Kingdom.  The United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; Britain consists of everything but Northern Ireland.

For those reasons, this shirt is PERFECT.

Buy it here.  It’s on sale for $14.99 this week.

I already own three shirts from bustedtees.com: Without Me, It’s Just Aweso; Irish I Were Drunk (I wear it exclusively on St. Paddy’s Day and on days when I go to Celtics games) and SILF.

I swear, Busted Tees isn’t paying me to advertise their wares.  The fact that the “Were #1″ shirt took me a second to actually get it made it well worth posting!

I just discovered a delicious new Web site: passiveaggressivenotes.com.  There is so much great material there!

Check this one out:

Ordinarily, I dislike personification of inanimate objects, especially man-made objects like kitchen appliances.

Throw the grammatical errors into the mix and I just want to leave that refrigerator and freezer door wide open until the ice starts melting and dripping down onto the milk cartons!

I am a fan of funny T-shirts (I wore my “Without Me, It’s Just Aweso” shirt when I did my Boston Globe interview, and I recently bought SILF from Busted Tees – that one was a hit at work!), and when I saw the ad for NoiseBot, I clicked on it.

Most of these shirts aren’t very funny, but I did like the one that said, “Make awkward sexual advances, not war.”

As I looked them over, I found two in particular that I thought would be of interest to you readers.  There is an awesome one and an awful one.  Check them out:

Awesome:

Awful:

We know why.

I’m watching Idol Gives Back on TV right now.  It’s heartbreaking.  (Click here to donate to Idol Gives Back, which divides the donations among six charities in the U.S. and in Africa.)

Many celebrities are making appearances on the show, including one of my favorite celebrity couples, David and Victoria Beckham.

Excerpts from their speech, which I wrote down as soon as I heard it:

Victoria: “David and myself are fortunate enough to be here [to be here to tell you to donate, etc. -- didn't get the whole thing].”
David: “Please join Victoria and myself in donating.”

The word myself is completely out of place.  It should be I in the first sentence and me in the second.

If you ever have doubt over whether you should say “and myself” — or “and I” for that matter — drop the other subject.

I am fortunate enough to be here — not myself is fortunate enough to be here.

Please join me in donating — not please join myself in donating.

I know that it’s not their fault.  The show’s writers are the ones to blame.  Though it’s within my rights to criticize them, I do feel a tad guilty insulting a good cause like this one. 

But I have to be honest with myself.  Even if they had written those awkward sentences themselves, I wouldn’t have minded.  They’re too damn good-looking.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time beauty caused me to overlook grammar errors.  I think my friends know where I’m going with this one.  :-/

Please donate if you can afford to do so.  $10.00 buys a mosquito net.  That could save one or more lives in Africa.