GTS#1 accepts no liability for the breakfast beverage you’re about to snort all over your keyboard.
Happy Friday, y’all!
GTS#1 accepts no liability for the breakfast beverage you’re about to snort all over your keyboard.
Happy Friday, y’all!
Reporter #1 captured this… thing… somewhere. She didn’t provide a lot of detail, either in background or in pixels.
I’m guessing bumper sticker.
She did, however, provide a lovely transcription:
Retired
No boss
Don’t ask me to do
a dam thing
So waddya want, Reporter #1? You wanna ask him to spell correctly? I dare you.
Kacia sent this in, apparently as a plea for rescue. She captioned this “early morning breakfast with my dad.” It’s a little photographic PTSD capsule reminding me of the years of my life in which piles of snow like that lay in between me and things to eat. And why are you having “breakfast” in the middle of the darkest part of night? Move south, y’all; it’s sunny down here!
Ahem.
Anyway. Yes. This is awful.
I was going to joke that they could save themselves by presenting a mascot-figure in a snazzy suit and name him “Gentleman Fashion.” But then I noticed the misspelling.
I hope it didn’t put you off your grits and co-cola, Kacia. What? You don’t eat grits and co-cola for breakfast up where the snowdrifts are eyebrow-deep?
You know that scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye’s all “On one hand… but on the other hand… but on the other hand…” like a philosophical octopus? This picture reminds me of that.
The gas stinks. The service… uh… don’t. The grammar, however…
And a tiny little itch in the back of my brain really wants to insert a hyphen in “clean-burning.” But I’ll let that one go.
Thanks, GTS#1!
I will admit that it wasn’t that long ago that I myself didn’t understand this distinction. I did it wrong, in public, and was called on it, and it was embarrassing. But I am not a professional writer.
You see, Dear Readers, it turns out that “disinterested” and “uninterested” aren’t actually synonyms. I don’t know what it is about “uninterested.” It just sounds like a fake word to me. So I avoided it, and used the classier-sounding “disinterested” incorrectly.
Now that I know better, I was super-curious about what this article might address. I figured they were asking parents to buy into something and then thinking about fining or otherwise depriving parents who failed to do so. But no.
As I’ve said, I’m willing to give a lot of leeway for translations and writing by non-native speakers. But.
Thanks for the moment of WHUH, GrammarTroika Sister #1!
Something weird happened to me yesterday.
First I got an email from Kacia. Kacia has earned her RPB Badge many times over, so this was obviously getting posted.
Oh, Target. How many ways is this wrong? The word you’re abbreviating is “until,” so there’s no need to add an extra “l” when you abbreviate it. I’ll let the backwards single-quote function as an apostrophe because there’s no point in getting too technical when you’re going to do stuff that stupid. And then, of course, there’s… whatever is going on up top there. You’re missing an apostrophe in “time’s,” and even if we allow the lack of capitalization because you’re being artsy, the colloquialism you were looking for is a-ticking (or, one might argue, a-tickin’) and not… whatever that dot is.
YARRRRRGH.
Then! This is the weird part! Moments later, I got a text. At first I thought Kacia had gone all overboard and REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted me to post this, but then I realized it was actually from Q! But it is subtly different!
I will tell you that my head nearly asplode with the “tictac,” because that was all I could see in my text software. At first I thought they’d decided to Frenchify the common “tick-tock,” or else it was some kind of subliminal breath mint advertising (do they still make those things? they were gross). But when I scrolled down and saw the Spanish below I figured they probably just decided to translate it funny. Because the English doesn’t say “Tick-tock. Tick-tock.” It says “We don’t know how to use apostrophes, and we’re trying to use a colloquial construction but haven’t quite let go of our fondness of the letter ‘g.'”
Perhaps they couldn’t figure out how to say all that in Spanish?
Thanks, Kacia and Q!
Do we need a new category for restrooms? I feel like we do. You wouldn’t think there would be so many possible permutations of the very simple gender binary to which our society subscribes.
Sometimes you’re doing a thing, and it’s so much fun you just don’t want to stop. I get that.
I’m just not sure that “pressing the ‘f’ key” is usually one of those activities. For, you know, normal people.
As always, thanks, Kacia!