The Best (worst) Spelling and Grammar Errors Thread - Page 8

Ha, funny video (audio).

Quote:

Originally Posted by zeg 

 

To be fair, the first two of those have some reasonable logic behind them. The New York Times only recently (~ 2006) stopped using an apostrophe after decades, and the acronym is a reasonable, if unnecessary, extension of the rules for plural letters (now only for lower case plural letters, at least according to the Chicago Manual of Style). Those two don't bother me so much because of that---they're more arbitrary than mixing up "it's" and "its."

Although given the uses of apostrophes they have no place in denoting a decade of a plural. Neither are contractions or indicating possession.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Missouri Swede 

 

Some are difficult. What would the plural of TaylorMade R11S be? R11Ss? R11S's?

 

My choice: try to reword the sentence to avoid it.

I don't see why it's difficult. A plural requires an 's' on the end, not an apostrophe.

I'm heading over to the Bassess' house for dinner tonight.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fraser 

Although given the uses of apostrophes they have no place in denoting a decade of a plural. Neither are contractions or indicating possession.

Well, apostrophes do have legitimate uses in plurals. Per the Chicago Manual of Style, lower-case letters and abbreviations with either 2+ periods or mixed case all form plurals with apostrophes. ("x's and y's," "M.A.'s and Ph.D's," and "MAs and PhD's.")

Although I don't see a rule for abbreviations like R11S, it's hard to argue against the possibility of confusion (I didn't realize they'd released the R11Ss already!). Since the purpose of punctuation is to reduce confusion, that sort of use isn't crazy---even if technically incorrect, it is analogous to other exceptions to the usual "contraction or possessive" usage.

The rules are not simple enough to make all apostrophe errors objects of ridicule. While "its" and "it's" come up often enough, not everyone is up on the details of their style manual.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dak4n6 

 

I forgot about this gem. This is the literary equivalent to white noise.

 

Or maybe William Faulkner has risen from the dead and is posting on TST?

Wow. I'm out of breath from running on so long.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe

I'm going to go ahead and call myself out on one.

"Pom Tree" ha ha. I took some flack for it during my post . I was going for "Palm Tree" as I'm sure everyone new lol.

The one guys said " I don't see any Pomegranate trees?" lol

Quote:

Originally Posted by iacas 

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling

 

 

 

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe

Damn, I actually need to learn almost everything on this poster board ha ha. For the sake of myself and fellow readers, I will take some time to study this board . Maybe even read up on some more common English knowledge. My posts can be hard to read at times, and believe me, they where even harder to write. If it wasn't for spell check, they would look much worse. Plus, spell checker doesn't fix things like.... "Track meat" oops ha ha. I was trying to spell track meet, obviously.

lol @ Jamo's avatar.

So I was stunned to see that Michael Clarke Duncan passed away.  Then in the comments section of the article I tried (and failed) to make sense of this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by dak4n6 

Chimpanze typing on a computer is all I can think of.

 

Who is Michael Clarke Duncan?

The huge actor with the big smile from movies like Armageddon, The Green Mile and Talladega Nights.

Nothing makes me want to buy a new product more than poor grammar.  It creates a tremendous amount of confidence in the product's supporters