Man, am I conflicted about this one:
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It’s an interesting photo and a clever caption, but that egregious apostrophe misuse kind of sours the experience for me. I know it’s folly to expect grammatical correctness from the medium that brought us “I can has cheezburger,” but there are some things I can overlook in the name of humorous representations of hypothetical feline speech and some I cannot…
Sigh. I’m going to go take an ibuprofen now.
First, a brief public service announcement: This edition of “The Bloody Red Pen” concerns itself with clinical terminology as applied to the female nether regions. If you’re the sort who gets indignant or starts feeling all squicky inside when you hear or read about such things, you might want to go check out some pictures of cats with funny captions for a while. Go ahead, I won’t hold it against you. We’ll just plan on catching up later.
Every region of the country has its own dialect, a collection of pronunciations, vocabulary, and so forth that are unique to that place, and Utah is no exception. But usually that dialect is confined to spoken language; with the exception of Mark Twain, no one writes words the way people actually pronounce them. So I can only assume that whoever wrote this brief paragraph about Tool Logic Survival Cards in the Salt Lake Tribune was not intentionally trying to capture the weird way Utahns flatten words that sound like “eel” into “ill”:
The 1.3-ounce Survival Card I includes a fixed serrated stainless still blade, a magnesium allow fire starter, a loud signal whistle, an 8x power lens, a compass, tweezer and toothpick.
I could be wrong, of course, since this description appears to have been lifted more or less directly from the product’s Web page, and over there the blade is said to be made of steel. Perhaps this really was an exercise in what we marketing and tech-writer types call localization, i.e., when a document’s spelling and usage is adjusted to suit the area where the document is to be published. (True story: A co-worker of mine who hails from Mississippi and Georgia and has worked very hard to rid herself of her Southern accent — she feels that it’s too often misinterpreted as a sign of low intelligence — recently thanked me for pronouncing “deal” properly, instead of like “dill”; it’s apparently one of her pet peeves about living here. I’m far more bothered by the a/o inversion myself; many Utahns, especially older and/or rural ones, would say “born” like “barn” and vice versa. I cringe when my mom talks about “hornessing the harse.”)
However, I don’t think even localization can excuse the “magnesium allow” thing. That’s just plain wrong.
For the record, this entry marks the beginning of a whole new category of entries here on Simple Tricks and Nonsense: The Bloody Red Pen, a compendium of all these dippy grammar and usage errors I seem to keep running across. If I can find a few free moments, I’ll go back and re-categorize the older such entries, so you can find all these little rants in one convenient bin. Assuming you’d have any reason to, that is…
The Girlfriend and I passed a pleasant afternoon today watching DVDs, one of which was a little film called Fanboys. If you’ve never heard of it, don’t feel bad; I’m not sure it got a wide theatrical release, and it was probably only in the theaters that did show it for 10 minutes or so. It’s got a winning premise: set in fall of 1998, months before The Phanton Menace is due to premiere, a group of nerdy friends embark on a cross-country roadtrip to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, where they intend to steal a work print of the movie so their buddy who has cancer can see it before he dies. Unfortunately, the execution of that premise is a little rough. While the film has a number of good sight-gags and a few knee-slapping moments, it also has some really tedious segments, and the ending isn’t nearly as poignant as it ought to be. Also, the script perpetuates some very tired stereotypes about the fanboy scene that are just this side of insulting, and there’s a really bizarre running gag about Star Wars fans being the mortal enemies of Star Trek fans. That strikes me as deeply false, the sort of rookie error made by a screenwriter who doesn’t know his subject nearly as well as he thinks he does; every bona-fide fanboy and -girl I know tends to like both franchises to one degree or another, if not equally. Fanboys is pleasant enough, but I think a movie called Free Enterprise from about 10 years ago covered the same basic territory far more effectively.
However, this entry isn’t really intended to be a movie review. It’s a rant about a very common punctuation error that I, with my proofreading superpowers, am constantly running across out there in the real world, and it drives me absolutely crazy. It turns up everywhere, even in places where you’d expect a certain command of the English language. Like, say, in movie credits. See if you can pick it out in this transcription of a line from the closing credits of Fanboys:
Special Thanks to The Skywalker Ranch and It’s Wonderful Staff
Do you see it? The apostrophe in “It’s”? Do you think whoever typed up this film’s credits really meant to say “The Skywalker Ranch and It Is Wonderful Staff”? Because that’s what it means when you put an apostrophe in between “it” and “s.” That means you’re looking at a contraction of the words “it is.” The possessive form of the word “it” is “its.” Just three letters, no apostrophe. Yes, that is a contradiction to the way nearly every possessive in the English language is formed, but, well, that’s English for you.
Let me make this easy for everyone:
Got it? I hope so, as there will be a quiz later. And just in case you think I’m overreacting here, just consider this:
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I’m going to go take an aspirin now…
A health-related PSA seen on a placard on the train last night:
Breathe Easier
Get Screened
Their is a good chance it will save your life.
Their is a chance? I can’t tell you how much that hurts…
It was a busy day in the Proofreader’s Cave, deep in the bowels of one of the glorious metropolitan skyscrapers in fabulous downtown Salt Lake. And not merely busy, but spiritually trying as well. Because, for some reason or other — evil spirits? Sunspots? Global warming? — there was a steady stream of extraordinarily ghastly material passing before my aching eyes today. It’s usually not so steadily awful. Most of the time, it’s adequate-to-good with only occasional clunkers to liven up the mix. Today, though… wow. It was all bad today. However, there’s awful and then there’s awful, and the following sentence stood out even against that vast, wine-dark sea of fetid effluvium:
[Acronym A], an enhancement to [Acronym B], allows [Company Y] to manage the performance of critical enterprise applications end-to-end globally and optimize the performance dynamically across any network according to user criticality and bandwidth allocation.
Got that? Yeah, neither did I, not until I’d read it three times. Which is not exactly the hallmark of what I’d call good writing. It burns the creative soul to have to read this stuff, let me tell you…
Incidentally, as long as we’re chatting, here’s a Jargon Alert for you: “value stack,” as in “both competitors are moving up the value stack into IT services.” That’s one I’m going to be trying to work into daily usage for sure.
And finally, the amusing error of the day: I requested that the word “synchronization” be changed to “synchronize.” Well, someone misunderstood my scribblings, so when I got the document in question back for final inspection, I saw that the word had become — are you ready for this? — “synchronizate.” That’s almost as good as the time in 9th grade geology class when my buddy Keith couldn’t think of the verb form of the word “revolution” — that would be “revolve,” of course — and came up with “revolute” instead.
Yeah… good times down there in the old Proofreaders Cave, good times…
Business writing is so painful sometimes…
Some see the emergence of UC&C as the catalyst for a sea change in long-established business organizational models, particularly as new methods of team productivity supplant conventional corporate hierarchies as potent mechanisms for wealth creation.
The first half of that sentence isn’t too bad, but everything from the comma forward… oy. It makes my heart hurt.
One of the amusing/frustrating things about what I do for a living is that few people actually understand what I do for a living. Seriously, no one knows what the hell a proofreader actually does. When I’m introduced to people at parties and the inevitable “what do you do?” question comes up, my answer is usually followed by polite nods and something like, “uh-huh, uh-huh… so what do you do?” I think most folks have a vague sense that I’m the last, best defense against misspelled words (which is certainly one aspect of what I do), but the intricacies of the Chicago Manual, the vagaries of client-specific stylistic quirks, and the transcendent beauty of the serial comma — these are all usually quite beyond the imagination of the uninitiated. That’s to be expected, though; I wouldn’t know the ins and outs of an investment banker’s job, either.
The thing that’s really difficult for me to swallow is the confusion about the role of proofing within my own company. Just the other day, for example, one of my colleagues on the proofreading team received the following from a coworker:
Hi Proofer X* –
I know you’re slammed, but wondered if you could send a brief (2 sentence) description of what exactly the Account Y* proofreaders look for when they review Account Y* documents.
What my immediate response lacked in diplomacy, it made up for in accuracy: “Proofreaders: we keep you from looking stupid.”
My colleague immediately amended that with, “…when we’re not too busy trying to keep from looking stupid ourselves … ”
Well, after a few more exchanges of this smart-alecky caliber, someone finally came up with the definitive word on what it is, exactly, that we do… and, naturally enough as it came from literary, over-educated types who always had delusions of doing something much grander with our lives, it was in the form of a haiku, which I will now share with my three loyal readers:
Despair and blackness
Send proof that it is worth it
The emptiest void
That may not mean much to the average joe, but trust me, to those of us who hunt the wild apostrophe on a daily basis, this is frackin’ brilliant. Really. Didn’t you catch the pun? Brilliant, I say!
* Names changed to protect the not-so-innocent.
Um… I really have nothing to say about this, but it was so magnificently daft that I simply had to share:
To create a install script to update the binary on the target computer, you need to create an install script.
Circular logic at its finest, eh? Pretty much everything I’ve proofread all bloody day has looked something like that…
Oh, boy, here we go again… another perfectly good noun transmogrified into an inelegant verb by the corporate buzz-speakers. From the document I’m proofing at work this afternoon:
“Can you evidence your compliance to… these standards?”
Evidence your compliance? Do you think they mean supply evidence of your compliance?
If you need me for the next few minutes, I’ll be beating my head on a copy of Merriam-Webster’s.
[Update: Huh. According to Merriam-Webster’s, evidence was a verb, once upon a time. Circa 1610, to be precise, when it meant “to offer evidence of : PROVE, EVINCE syn see SHOW.”
Somehow, I doubt that whoever wrote the whitepaper I found the term in knew that, though.]