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.
First of all, I’d just like to say that Davery has an awesome name, and I have always thought so.
That out of the way, on to Davery’s submission!
Davery would like to know “Whose naughty or nice what? Don’t leave us hanging!”
I mean, I’m not going to argue with turtles about proper restaurant etiquette. But I will argue with them about the difference between “whose” and “who’s.” Cowabunga!
This one is just wonderful.
Thanks for a beautiful week, Susan!
First of all, I’d like to point out that I could have cropped this picture. I chose not to because I find it so amusing that Susan pulled over and photographed this one from her car!
Susan asks, “Hmmm… what is .99 of a tan? One of my pet peeves is what that is!” Apparently Susan really wants you to include a zero before a decimal point. I’m not well-versed enough in math errors to comment on that, but I will say that this one calls to mind the beauty that is VerizonMath. And anything that does that is a good thing.
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!
Susan found this t-shirt beautifying a local high school football game. Look closely!
(For the vision-impaired: that says “No one has ever drown in sweat.”)
I’m a fan of hyphenating “no-one,” but I know that’s not universally accepted, so “no one” gets an easy pass. But I’m curious about “has drown.” Is that a verb-conjugation error? Or is it my old friend, the Southern Loathing of -ED, which leads to “can vegetables”?
Welcome to Susan Week! My old friend S2W has offered up a series of delicious Red-Pen-able photographs for our viewing pleasure. We begin with what Susan calls “bad apostrophe usage with good common sense.”
It’s a double standard because employee’s are supposed to wash their hands, but employer’s don’t have to proofread their signage. Of course, “employee” is a word that ends with a vowel, and “employer” is not, so, you know.
NOTE: This post has been updated to include Al’s original picture, as per his comment below. Sorry, Al!
Al found this “two-fer of failure,” to use his words. But I don’t know. I’m in such a good mood after my earlier complete capitulation to evolving rules of punctuation that I almost want to be generous here.
It’s possible that this is a sign for, say, a play entitled “Dialogues on the Plague of the 80s,” which is known by its more colloquial title “Hearing AIDS.” Of course, in that case, we have a capitalization error. So I give up.
It really is true. Folks! Use an apostrophe any time a word ends in a vowel and you’re pluralizing it! Easy and simple!
I’ve decided it will just be easier if we give up. Let’s start a political campaign to get apostrophes officially used to pluralize any word ending with a vowel. Note that these people had no problem with “pets” or “patients.”
