Entries Tagged 'capitalization' ↓

It’s not that I don’t enjoy a fully-grown modern man invoking a curse against another fully-grown modern man.  I totally do.  It’s just that this letter from Cavaliers Majority Owner Dan Gilbert seems to also contain a little punctuation abuse.

Here’s a screen-cap, for posterity (edited only for layout).  Click to embiggen.

I was going to red-pen this, but it’s more fun like a puzzle.  How many things annoy YOU, Dear Reader?

Reporter #1 is back with this troubling submission.

She quips, “I suppose grammatical errors go along with writing an application that only works as intended half the time.”

Now that’s where I draw the line, Reporter #1.  Nobody insults FarmVille on this blog.  Just because I have cut myself off in order to get some sleep doesn’t mean I’m going to let you knock that sweet, sweet harvesting, opening all those thrilling gifts, or struggling to build buildings that subsequently serve no redeemable purpose.  In fact — [WHOA THERE, FARMER! YOUR BLOG IS OUT OF SYNC WITH THE GAME.  CLICK "OKAY" TO REFRESH.]

Galen says:

This is posted above the fish tank at my school. It replaced a sign that said essentially the same thing, it just didn’t have the interesting punctuation. I will say that this new sign manages to attract my attention every time I go by (but not in a good way).

So we have the obvious quotation-mark abuse, random capitalization, and one that’s annoying me a lot recently.  I see the “hyphen-preposition” construction a lot on the web, as in “log-on” or “sign-in.”  I understand that one would want to hyphenate if one were modifying a noun, such as “sign-in sheet” or “log-in process.”  But I’m far more likely to see “please log-in now,” which I hate.  And now we see that phenomenon expanding to fish tanks.  What’s next, people??  What’s next?

Reporter #1 wants us all to warm up our brains this fine Monday morning with a little puzzle.  (Click the pictures for clearer images.)

Continue reading →

Kacia found this punctuation travesty in a small restaurant in Wisconsin, on an ad for a business that does fireworks displays.

There has to be a logic here.  Let’s see.  Oh, you use apostrophes to pluralize!  No, can’t be that, because “weddings” and “graduations” are plural.  Is it a rule that you have to use an apostrophe after a y to pluralize?   Nope, can’t be that, because “birthdays” has no apostrophe.

I give up!  Thanks, Kacia!

Reporter #1 has done it again.

By day? We are mild-mannered white-collar workers.  By night? We are VIRTUAL FARMERS! … Who don’t understand the rules of Capitalization, apparently.

I’d say they’re confused about punctuation, too!

Reporter #1 is back!  She has this to say:

I can’t decide if the sheer offensiveness of it outweighs the bad grammar, or if the two combined is just all the more horrid.

Yeah, that really is a fascinating dilemma, Reporter #1.  Random capitalization, missing punctuation, the charming use of “n” as a word, and whatever “with political 2 cents” can be called.  You’ve done it again!

Dave says this:

The copyediting at the Post Sports section has been going downhill for awhile, now, leading to an epic front page, above-the-fold miss like this one. I dunno, maybe this plays differently in ATL, where coke is a generic term for cola and soda. Up north, it equals *hilarious*.

Well, as a Southerner, I had no trouble parsing that one.  I see Dave’s point, though.  Discuss.

Normally I ignore those little ads on the right side of my Facebook page.  If I tried to red pen all of them I’d have a full-time job right there!  But this one was just too good to miss.

Did you catch that, guys?  Nurses are in Desperate Need.  It does make one wonder why anybody would want to become a nurse, given that they’re in such Desperate Need.  It’s so desperate that it has to be capitalized!  And that sentence fragment at the end just completes the disaster.

Susan went to Long John Silver’s and got all Red Pen-y up on them.  This is what she saw:

Let’s start at the top and move clockwise.   First we have this:

Susan thinks that this is evidence of an author fighting with automatic spell-check, which capitalizes each new line.  I’m worried that it might just be random.  Either way, you can’t gloss over the cheerful “Taste and Quality” quotation abuse!

This one’s harder to see, so I’ll summarize:  the words “fish” and “shellfish” are apparently proper nouns and are capitalized where they shouldn’t be.  The best part is that the error is replicated in the Spanish.

And last, but not least:

I think they murdered a period in there somewhere.

3 Wednesday cheers for Susan!