Yesterday, I spent some time chuckling at this. It's the now rather famous Virgin Atlantic complaint letter about the food on board from Mumbai to London. It's hilariously well written, but I must say on closer inspection something began to grate. Why oh why can't people seem to punctuate and spell properly anymore? For example:
"What sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in?" Hmmm - there MIGHT be peas in the desert, I suppose, if there were a greenhouse and good irrigation?
"Could bring it crashing to it's knees...." Arrrggghhh! The misplaced apostrophe. This particularly gets my goat. Its is the possessive, and with an apostrophe it of course means something completely different. I also have a major gripe, whilst still dealing vaguely with aviation, about the use of an apostrophe in the shortening of Flight Attendants, FAs. Why on earth would anyone want to put an apostrophe there? It's a plural, my dears. You're not talking about the FA's suitcase (singular), or the FAs' uniforms (plural). This rule also of course also applies to CDs, DVDs and PCs, etc.
And don't get me started on your and you're, their and they're, and the random use (or complete absence) of commas, colons and semi colons.
I just wonder whether schools (except mine) actually ever teach these things. Can you tell I used to teach English?
Ok, end of rant. I feel better now.
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6 comments:
I do the same thing. I pore over the bad grammar in the blogs I read. I can't say I'm perfect either, but it's a habit nonetheless.
(Also, when do I get some link love? I've been following you and commenting since the beginning?)
Good point Nicole! How remiss of me. Consider yourself added...
I'm probably not perfect either, but the your, you're thing really irritates me.
Once on facebook I got an invite to participat in a quiz, but the spelling irritated me too much to complete it!
That said, I'd rather have read this letter with the crappy punctuation than without it.
I keep imagining you sat at your computer with a little red pen scribbling corrections all over the screen as you read my blog! HAHA
THANK YOU!!!
I am a self-confessed grammar nazi. Someone pointed out that in my blog, I'd misspelled lose 'loose'. I almost screamed, I was so embarrassed! The only place I accept poor grammar is in text messages, because it's so damned hard to get to the apostrophe character on a phone keyset. Press 1 seven times? No thanks.
Favourite occupation: using semi-colons in proper situations as much as possible; I just love it!
The most amazing one to me is "greater then". I see this all the time out there on the Interwebs (sic). There are MANY people who don't seem to know the difference between "then" and "than". Isn't this basic English you learn at about age 5? Arrgghh! If people can't understand that it's "greater than", how in the world will they ever distinguish between "less" and "fewer"?
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