• Just wait’ll we get our grammar on you …
• Hot topic …
• On the radio …

Looks like we have a couple of new opponents to take on:

StriVectin

“MORE SCIENCE. LESS WRINKLES.” & “More science. Less eye lines.”

FORD

“MORE GO. LESS STOPS.”

In addition, a faithful follower writes,

“Ugh!  Have you seen the Mercedes commercial?! ”More technology, less doors.” I’m hoping it’s really clever and I just don’t understand it. Surely the grammar couldn’t be that bad, could it?”

We encourage you to look back to our posts on the subject “Less” vs. “Fewer”.

• Limit less …
• Less is not always more …
• tbs, terribly bad syntax … very funny? 

Would these grammar goofs affect your buying decisions?

In this case, “Yes! We Have No Grammar” might be more appropriate for this Kroger gas station. Here’s the display we had to see while filling up the car. Ouch!

The Handwriting Is on the Wall

Filed under: Education, Innovation, Language, Philosophy, Psychology — cliftonchadwick JULY 9, 2011

The Handwriting Is on the Wall

Learning cursive is going the way of the quill pen. It’s only the end of civilization as we know it

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Fifty years from now, no one in Indiana—or at least, no one born and raised in Indiana—will be able to write cursive. On the other hand, everyone there will be able to type, and by then technology might have made the ability to sign your name redundant. If it has not, perhaps you will be able to hire an out-of-stater or immigrant to sign your will or marriage certificate for you.

State officials recently announced that Indiana schools will no longer be required to teach children to write longhand, so that students can focus on typing. This is because writing by hand is so very—well, so very 4000 B.C. to A.D. 2010. We have now entered a new era: A.H., After Handwriting.

The schoolchildren of Indiana—and those of an increasing number of other states—will therefore never know the joys of penmanship that I experienced as a child. In those days, we still had little porcelain inkwells in the tops of our desks. The watery blue ink eventually evaporated to a deep blue gritty residue, and we used scratchy dip-pens with wooden handles, whose nibs were forever bending and breaking.

Our whole world was inky. Our desktops were soaked in ink; it got into our skin, under our nails and into our clothes. We even began to smell of it. For those of us who were even slightly academically inclined, the callus that formed on the skin of the side of the middle finger as it rubbed against the wood of the pen was a matter of pride: We measured our diligence by the thickness of the callus and longed for it to grow bigger.

I still remember my pride in my first full-length handwritten composition: an eight-page account of crossing the Gobi Desert in a Rolls-Royce, accompanied by blots, smudges and inky fingerprints. To my chagrin and everlasting regret, my teacher was not impressed by my formidable effort. She said that I must keep to reality and not be so imaginative.

Despite many hours first of tracing, then of copying copperplate examples, my handwriting never became other than serviceable at best. I was left-handed, and this made things more difficult because, whether I pushed or pulled the pen, smudges followed my writing across the page. Luckily, though, we had emerged from the dark ages when left-handers were forced to use their right hands. Little did we know, it was the beginning of the pedagogic liberalism that has now brought us to the abandonment of writing altogether.

Another character-building joy that may be denied to Indiana schoolchildren is the handwritten exam. They will never know that peculiar slight ache in the forearm, produced by fevered scribbling as thoughts rushed through your mind in answer to questions such as “Was Louis XIV a good king?” (my answer was a firm and uncompromising “no”) and struggled to find written expression, only to slow down once it became clear that there were not enough of those thoughts to fill the allotted time. So then you deliberately made your handwriting deteriorate to make it appear that you could have written much more if only you had had the time, but unfortunately you did not. This kind of game continued into my early 20s.

Were my teachers ever taken in by it? I doubt it, but even then I knew it was all really a rite of passage, a slow induction into the adult world that I so longed to join. Since the need for such rites seems to be permanent in human societies, no doubt new such rites will develop for those who focus on the keyboard, but I do not know what they will be. Having reached the age when pessimism is almost hard-wired into the brain, I think they will not only be different but not as beneficial to the developing character.

Indeed, my first reaction to the news from Indiana was visceral despair, not only because the world I had known was now declared antediluvian, dead and buried, but because it presaged a further hollowing out of the human personality, a further colonization of the human mind by the virtual at the expense of the real.

When I scrawled and blotted and smudged my way across the page, I had the feeling that, for good or evil, what I had done was my own and unique. And since everyone’s writing was different, despite the uniformity of the exercises, our handwriting gave us a powerful, and very early, sense of our own individuality. Those who learn to write only on a screen will have more difficulty in distinguishing themselves from each other, and since the need to do so will remain, they will adopt more extreme ways of doing so. Less handwriting, then, more social pathology.

—Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of the physician Anthony Daniels. He is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

Just to jog your memory: cursive –adjective 1. (of handwriting) in flowing strokes with the letters joined together.

Sources: Cliftonchadwick’s Blog, dictionary.com, Mom

“Amy Kremer, who’s a leader of the Tea Party movement, said … that you will be – and this is her word, not mine – quote, ‘Palinized’ in this campaign. Do you understand the verb, and what would your definition of it be?”  

Click on the photo to see the video segment:

All politics aside, thank you Mr. Lauer for furthering our cause … especially in the “Verbalized …” category. This might just start a new sub-category: “Verbalized … Properly” (verbalized with a proper noun). Stay tuned.

See our series on Nouns gone bad:

• Nouns gone bad …
• Nouns gone bad … sequeled
• Nouns gone bad … Properly
• Badverbs … cousins to nouns gone bad
• Verbalized …
• SPAM: honorary noun gone bad …
• Yummy noun gone bad …

Quite a while ago, we blogged about a grammar error in a TV commercial for Chef Michael’s Dog Food.

See our post: Identity crisis …

“My name is Chef Michael and my dog Bailey and me love to hang out in the kitchen …” Should be: I.

We are very pleased to report that this grammar goof has been corrected!

This is our slogan in action: “we find it, you fix it.” Thanks for listening, Chef Michael’s!

Be sure to visit our friends over at Apostrophe Abuse, Apostrophe Catastrophes, Apostrophism, and, of course, Apostrophe Police, …

Oh my … really? What is our language coming to?

See our series on Nouns gone bad:

• Nouns gone bad …
• Nouns gone bad … sequeled
• Nouns gone bad … Properly
• Badverbs … cousins to nouns gone bad
• Verbalized …
• SPAM: honorary noun gone bad …
• Yummy noun gone bad …

• Today is Friday the 13th. Twenty million Americans are feeling unlucky today — people who suffer from friggatriskaidekaphobia. It’s a 99-year-old word made up of a combination of the Norse and Greek roots words for ‘fear’ and ‘Friday’ and ’13.’
• Folklorists say that the phobia itself is a combination of two separate superstition-induced phobias — 13 is unlucky in much of folklore and so is Friday. Whenever the first day of a month is a Sunday, there’s going to be a Friday the 13th that month.
• The number 13 has been unlucky for a long time. Numerologists point out that 12 is a complete number in Judeo-Christian culture: There are 12 months in a year, 12 hours on a standard clock, 12 Apostles, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 days of Christmas, 12 eggs in a dozen, of course, the 12 Steps of GRAMMARHOLICS (not so) ANONYMOUS, and so on.
• There’s something unsettling, even repugnant, about going just a bit ‘beyond completeness’ — that’s how academic folklorists rationalize the superstition, at least. The vast majority of skyscrapers have no 13th floor, the room number 13 is missing from many modern hotels, and many airliners do not have a row 13 in their passenger seating.
• As for Friday, it’s unlucky in a handful of ancient cultures. In Christianity, it’s the day of Jesus’ crucifixion.
• There have been 12 films in the Friday the 13th series. The 13th is due out on Friday the 13th of July in 2012.
• There are always the traditional folk remedies to ward off bad luck today: burning any socks with holes in them, or eating some gristle while standing on your head, or climbing to a mountaintop. And here’s the good news: There’s only one Friday the 13th this year. Some years can have up to three of them.

Enjoy!

References: Dad, CBS News, The Skeptic’s Dictionary, IMDb

We did a little research on apostrophe use in Mother’s Day and Father’s Day messages floating around cyberspace and …

Mom’s win!

By far, there were more mistake’s for Mother’s than there were foul up’s for Father’s … (of course, our apostrophe abuse is intentional here).

We thought you might get a chuckle at some of our findings, so, here you go:

• Happy Mother’s Day to all the lovely Mom’s!
• … wishing all the Mommy’s I know a Happy Mothers Day!! (this one could have just moved the mark to Mothers)
• We have to celebrate our mama’s by the way…
• … can’t wait to have dinner at moms house. (now, this one needs an apostrophe)
• Happy Mothers Day to all those amazing Mom’s out there
• … happy mother’s day to all d mom’s of d Boston celtics lol! (this one needs some Capitalization help, too)
• Thank You, Yeah Us Mom’s Do Rock.
• Happy Mother’s Day. Here’s to Mom’s everywhere! (incorrect, unless his mother is omnipresent)
• Happy Mother’s DAy to all tha mom’s n soon to b mom’s out there uu deserve it (this one needs some spelling help, too)

Therefore, today’s punctuation concentration is on avoiding that embarassing apostrophe catastrophe …

To start, let’s define this little character:

apostrophe. noun. a mark of punctuation ( ‘ )used to indicate possessive case or omission of one or more letter(s) from a word.

You may see some sources state that the apostrophe is also used for indicating plurals of abbreviations, acronyms and symbols. We heartily disagree with this usage — we feel that this practice is outdated.

We do like Grammar Book’s baker’s dozen of Rules for Apostrophes, so we’ll refer you to their site for the full details and just give you a summary here, with one addition from us:

Our Apostrophe Rule:

0. Do not use an apostrophe to form a plural. This goes for words, symbols, abbreviations, and acronyms. * (This is related to Rules 5. – names, and 11. – CAPS & numbers used as nouns, below, but more encompassing.)

* Here are examples of misuse according to our rule:

Grammar Book’s Apostrophe Rules:

1. Use the apostrophe with contractions.
2. Use the apostrophe to show possession.
3. Use the apostrophe where the noun that should follow is implied.
4. Use the apostrophe to show plural possession.
5. Do not use an apostrophe for the plural of a name. * (We have some people in mind who need to learn this rule!)
6. Use the apostrophe with a singular compound noun, to show possession.
7. Use the apostrophe with a plural compound noun, to show possession.
8. Use the apostrophe and s after the second name only if two people possess the same item.
9. Never use an apostrophe with possessive pronouns: his, hers, its, theirs, ours, yours, whose.
10. The only time an apostrophe is used for it’s is when it is a contraction for it is or it has. (Remember, “its” is a possessive pronoun – no apostrophe.) See photo below.
11. The plurals for capital letters and numbers used as nouns are not formed with apostrophes. *
12. Use the possessive case in front of a gerund (-ing word).
13. If the gerund has a pronoun in front of it, use the possessive form of that pronoun. (Refer to Rule 9. re: pronouns.)

Speaking of rules … we like this … from Trevor Coultart:

Should be its.

Sources: GrammarBook.com, Flickr