Like many translators and other word people, I have a low tolerance for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors in print. Thankfully it’s not just me; when I took a series of editing classes with Alice Levine a couple of years ago, she opened the class with a New Yorker cartoon (you don’t even need the picture to appreciate it) that featured a restaurant guest saying to a waiter, “I’ll have the misspelled Caesar salad and the improperly hyphenated veal osso-buco.” Needless to say, this cartoon provoked gales of laughter from the assembled crowd of editing students. A few people in the class even admitted that they refused to shop at Boulder’s only large-scale mall because of its improperly hyphenated name: Twenty Ninth Street (you’ll find the mall between 28th St. and 30th St., not at #20 9th St as the name would suggest). I’ve made my peace with Twenty Ninth Street, but here are a few habitual spelling and usage errors that drive me crazy.
- It’s instead of its. I recently received a conference announcement from a language industry professional association, proclaiming that this association’s upcoming conference would feature “education at it’s [sic] best.” I had a visceral reaction to this, similar to what I experienced on a recent trip to Ace Hardware (which at least isn’t a language industry entity) when I was confronted with an enormous sign asking, “Can’t find what your [sic] looking for?” Here’s a helpful page that explains the difference between it’s and its.
- Lightening instead of lightning. This one is everywhere too; I recently cringed to find it in a book that had done well enough to be reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. The lightening/lightning confusion really befuddles me because most people seem to pronounce these words correctly, i.e. “My hair color is too dark, I’m thinking of lightening it,” versus “If you see lightning, run for cover.” I don’t feel like I hear loads of people talking about getting “struck by light-en-ing” when they’re speaking, but for some reason the spelling confusion remains.
- “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less.” I think that many people just say or write this without thinking about the connotation, for example “I could care less what time we get home, I’m not in a rush.”
- Less versus fewer. When my neighborhood supermarket did a major renovation and still didn’t correct their “15 items or less” signs in the express checkout lanes, I seriously considered shopping elsewhere so as not to reward that kind of sloppiness (but proximity won out!). Grammar Girl has a great page of quick and dirty tips on less versus fewer. Nutshell version: fewer is for things you can count, less is for things you can’t. Fewer grammatical errors on signs, less suffering.
I feel so much better now… feel free to add your own most-hated misspellings too! Alot, loose/lose, they’re/their/there, aloud/allowed… it’s OK to vent!
I no longer buy into the strict presciptivism of less vs. fewer. I think “15 items or less” is fine. Using “fewer” in that case sounds like a stilted, pendantic version of English designed for peevologists.
In any case, how about spelling/grammar peeves in your target language?
Eric, I really like the term “peevologists,” great! I see what you mean about less and fewer. Pet peeves in our non-English languages could be fuel for its own blog! I have a few in French but I’m saving them 🙂
Less/fewer
The countable/uncountable rule is clearly broken here but perhaps this is a case when language users’ instinctive feeling about what is right wins out.
When people says 10 items or less they view their basket as a mass of products rather than a collection of individual products in the same way that people say “I’ve got less than 20 dollars in my pocket”.
Good point Stuart, thank you! I’m still on the side of “fewer” items (partially because it gives me something to think about in the supermarket checkout line?) but I definitely see your point about the dollars. You’re not talking about individual dollars but about a quantity of money.
Spotted recently in the translation blogosphere:
Congratulatory message on a well-written post: “Hat’s off”.
Thread on working at the weekend: someone who “purposefully” works on Sundays (while presumably taking a rather more desultory approach to weekday tasks).
My pet peeve: “with regards to” (global warming/computer programmes/Big Macs). What next – a hug and a kiss?
Those are fantastic examples, more than enough material for another blog post! “Hat’s off” I guess I could somewhat go along with (as in “my hat is off”?) but the other two are really bad. I love “give my regards to global warming!” a great way to remember not to use that expression!
Hi Corinne, I’m Italian, and also have a list for my mother-tongue language (as every translator on earth, I guess :-P); in English, the one I really can’t stand is ‘seperate’ instead of ‘separate’. As for apostrophes, usually I send people to this website: http://www.angryflower.com/aposter.html
Sooner or later I’ll buy that poster myself 😛
Thanks for your comment, the “Bob the Angry Flower” poster is great (add apostrophes wherever you want, excellent idea!).
There are also people who misspell the word “misspell”! 😀
Why don’t they check the correct spelling of a word on a dictionary, when in doubt?
Very interesting article! I shared it on my Facebook page.
Yes, I should have mentioned the word “misspell” itself, you’re right! And I have to agree, when there are so many free online dictionaries, why not just Google the word? Fortunately we translators have each other!
For all of you “fewer” fans Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco has you covered:
http://japanese-me.com/2008/12/14/one-month-to-go/
Karla, that photo on your blog made my day! Can we send it to Kroger?
Great post but please tell me what’s wrong with the Caesar salad… I’m puzzled…
Fiona, I think (if I remember correctly!) that the person in the cartoon is looking at the menu, presumably the salad was spelled “Cesar” (common misspelling on US menus) and he’s correcting it in the text of the cartoon. Thanks for reading!
On Twitter I recently saw a three-letter word with two spelling errors! “Ads” was written “add’s”. Can’t think of a much worse misspelling.
Maija, thanks for your comment. “Add’s” is even worse than some of the examples I mentioned, I’m not sure how you survived it 🙂 As you said, two errors in three letters takes some creativity!
Hi Corinne,
I’m glad you mentioned “could care less”. This is never heard from a UK speaker, but I’ve seen/heard it so frequently in American books and on American TV shows that I assumed it was a kosher expression on that side of the pond. I’m relieved to learn that it’s merely a widely-accepted error!
Thanks, Rob! I really like the expression “widely-accepted error,” it hits the nail on the head. I noticed the same thing when President Bush’s mispronunciation of “nuclear” (he pronounces it “nucular”) caught on; another widely-accepted error in action!
Nice post, I will also link to it in my facebook, if you don’t mind!
I completely agree with you. I cannot understand why some people will not consider important checking their spelling when writing something, specially if it’s going to be out there for everyone to see…
Also, thank you for bringing the “less vs. fewer”. I had given it a second thought.
Keep up the good job, I never miss your posts! ^_^
Of course, feel free to put a link on Facebook and thanks for your comment!
Judy’s pet peeve: third-person singular possessive, as in “the dog ate it’s food” — yuck! Second pet peeve: apostrophes used very liberally for plurals, as in “Open Sunday’s.” We even have a German-language website for translation and spelling mistakes. Spotted at a large Vegas casino showroom: “No camera’s allowed.” Shudder.
That’s a huge pet peeve of mine. “Open Sunday’s” is cringe-inducing (and incredibly common), but I was thinking about your second example and realized that it COULD be taken to mean “no camera is allowed,” as in “not a single camera.” However that is almost definitely not what they meant, heh.
Don’t come down so hard on the “alot” spelling. Poor alot.
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
Hello Corinne,
I’m a student of Japanese and an aspiring translator who’s been avidly following your incredibly helpful blog for a while now—and I simply must come out of the woodworks and comment, because this post coincided so well with one of my newest favourite posts:
Behold: Language Anger Management (or Langer Management, for short)
The blog, Language Log, is run by UPenn professors and is largely anti-prescriptivist, as one might expect, but it’s a fun read for language experts like translators. 😀 I only recently discovered it because of the Eyka… Eyky…. Icelandic volcano event.
Thanks for all the wonderful posts so far, by the way! You are an inspiration. 🙂
-pb
I just read this on the BBC news website in article about the rise of cloud computing:
“Microsoft’s direction is similar. It’s new Office 2010 software, to be launched next week, makes steps to integrate both “social connections” and online services.”
Aaaarrrrgghhhh!! Things have come to a pretty pass when even the BBC doesn’t know how to use “its” and “it’s”!
One that I see online *all* the time is “definately.” Makes my hair stand up on end!
Another one that really bugs me is the use of the subject pronoun “I” when the object pronoun “me” is correct. The most common one I hear all the time is “between you and *I*.” I just received an email with the closing line “thank you for thinking of my family and *I*.” I think this is a case of hyper-correction gone wild!
Great post!
I had never thought much about less vs. fewer and actually had to go look them up.
I feel like social media … aka Facebook … really draws a lot of attention to spelling errors for me. I constantly see status updates that say tomarrow, anyways, etc. and they drive me nuts!!
Amusing video aside on the matter of “I could care less”, from the Guardian (UK) at the latter of the following two links.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/language
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/language-usa
I really get a laugh out of people who cannot tell the difference between desert and dessert. I always remember that when talking about pies, cakes, and sweet treats, dessert is the correct answer because it is doubly delicious with two s’s. As for using contractions, in high school, my english teacher would give us an ‘ F ‘ if we used one in certain papers. I never got an F.