The morning error

October 5, 2014 • 4:12 am

Even bleary-eyed and uncaffeinated at 5:30 this morning, I knew something was wrong when I saw this truck. (I believe they’re setting up for some kind of student fair in the quad today.)

Ice

I’ve learned over the years that if I’m not absolutely certain how to spell a word, I look it up, and that’s happened plenty.

The worst one I’ve seen in my life was a sign in the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Food Co-op on a bin of spuds: “Potato’s”. This error seems to be so common that Steve Pinker names it in his new book The Sense of Style: “the grocer’s apostrophe.”

For many hilarious examples of apostrophe misuse, see the website “Apostrophe Abuse.”

 

76 thoughts on “The morning error”

  1. If I’m not certain how to spell a word, I Google it and get informed. Typically, I want to spell occasion with another i (occaision).

    1. Are you Australian? If I were trying to write how an Australian accent sounds to American ears, that’s how I would spell “occasion”.

  2. As cool as the occasional spelling error is, I’m always more rattled by the illogical messages that ads bring.

    *What* is it that “crushed cubes blocks”? The road?

    1. Must be an automotive wrecking service — delivering Internal Combustion Engine blocks that’ve already gone through the crusher and come out as cubes.

      …why anywhere other than a scrap metals recycling service would want such things, and why they’d want the engines separated from the rest of the scrap is beyond me….

      b&

  3. Grocers apostrophe’s are traditional in the UK. Grocer’s are notorious for sprinkling lot’s of apostrophe’s in all the wrong place’s, and leaving them out where theyr’e needed.

      1. I tend to *sometimes* forgive that in shops in London owned by Asians, where it is clear English is a second language.

        In the UK, you are also treated to wonderful butchery of Italian (which offends me as a Sicilian)…”pizza’s” and “panini’s.”

          1. Laughed right outta the joint, I presume;-) But you could still get around the issue by ordering 2 or more panini…

      2. This error seems to be so common that Steve Pinker names it in his new book The Sense of Style: “the grocer’s apostrophe.”

        Aka greengrocer’s apostrophe. Pinker may apply that name in his book, but he certainly did not invent it, it’s been around a while.

        Word Spy

    2. I don’t find grocer’s apostrophes terribly annoying, but I’ve spent the morning fighting my way through hundreds of Drilling Engineer’s apostrophes (and DE’s intermittent sprinklings of TLAs, ETLA’s, FETLA’s ; with an abundance of Intermittent Capitalisation). Which is a touch more annoying as the DE’s earn considerably more than I do.
      Grrrrr. Back to my own personal Albatross.

  5. I always have trouble with “occasion.” I usually put another “s” in, and when spell-check tells me it’s wrong, then I also add an “i” after the “a” without removing the extra “s.”

    Another word is “souvenir.” It always seems to me that it should be “souvenier.” The correct spelling looks wrong.

    Does this happen with other people? Is there some word that you insist on misspelling?

    1. I always have trouble with “necessary”. Where is the “c” where the “s” and how many of them.

    2. Masssachusssetts [sic] is my bugaboo. I’m a good to excellent speller, but nearly always have to go back and delete the second double ‘s’ when I see what I have typed.

      1. Not having grown up with the Mickey Mouse Club, when I try to spell the state that was recently governed by Haley Barbour, I tend to add a lot of beats to the song and wind up with, “Mississsipppi.”

        God damn!

        b&

        1. I think I learned from a skipping song. I think it was double dutch, which I never mastered.

          1. When I was a kid, we said “M-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter-I. Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter-I. Humpback-Humpback-I.”

        2. Haley Barbour is an avatar and apotheosis of enunciation and elocution.

          I wonder if, given two points, he can derive an equation in the form of y = mx + b.

        3. I heard a song with this line, “M, I, double S, I, double S, I double P, I.” Except for the M, double the consonants.

          I can’t spell expirement/expirament, however it goes.

          1. I learned it in a rythym: “M-I,S,S;I,S,S,I,P,P-I!” “Encyclopedia” I remember from Jimminy Crickets’ little song: “It’s in the En…cyclopedia: ENC,YC,LO,PEDIA!”

            I got bids for a roofing job a couple of years ago, and one was a very slick, very professional looking folder, but for the fact that on the front it said, “Offical Estimate”.

      2. Doug- maybe you’re thinking of the Quebec license plates: Je me souviens.

        And I think Brits and Canucks spell license licence? ( w poetic license?)

          2. Yes, Americans use license for both. Canadians use the British spelling. Here is a handy chart if you ever get confused over spellings. When I went to NZ for the first time, I couldn’t believe the spelling for “tire”. 🙂

  6. I was always a confident and accurate speller, but the internet has been a corrupting influence. Now I have to constantly check in case I’ve got it wrong.

    1. Same here, plus I spend so much time reading students’ incorrect papers and so little time reading properly edited works, I have trouble remembering the correct spelling of many words.

  8. For years, I drove past a store with a sign in its front window for “vynil seatcovers.” I never could believe that they didn’t know about the misspelling.

  9. There’s an ancient diner in Toronto at Bathurst and Dupont with a sign advertising “char brolied” meat. By the looks of the sign, it’s been there for decades.

      1. Google “Vesta Lunch” – you can see the sign on streetview if you’re positioned on Bathurst.

          1. You have to jiggle the view a bit – there’s also a truck making a right turn from some angles.

  10. Without trying to set up a straw man or stomp on the weak, I’ve always wondered if punctuation difficulty was associated with religiosity. Seems to me that the mind’s effort required to speak and write clearly somehow either forces more logical thinking, or is _correlated_ with more logical thinking. Has anyone ever done a study?

    1. No, I’m a life-long atheist and I hate English punctuation. I have a hard time with commas. I tend to just not use them and I think it’s because when I took German, they use commas very judiciously so I ended up confused when writing English.

    2. I wouldn’t think so. Paying strict attention to rules of grammar and punctuation has very little to do with thinking logically. Most rules are so arbitrary, and the exceptions so numerous, that the only way to learn them is through brute memorization.

  12. Saw an egregious one yesterday in a fast-food drive-up line:

    “Turn radio’s off when ordering”

    Oof.

  13. Years ago I was playing with the air cadet band at CFB Greenwood in Nova Scotia. Just before a big inspection we got a new skin for the base drum as the old one was in terrible shape. We were already to march unto the tarmac for the inspection when I noticed it said around the outside of the drum skin Altantic Squadron.

    Later I was working for a Catholic charity with their computer installation when their new signs came in for that year’s campaign. In English their theme was Faith, Hope and Love. They had their signs translated into French by a professional translating firm and their posters came back saying “Foie, Espoir et Armour” Two of use who spoke French laughed for about a minute before we could manage to tell them it said “Liver, Hope and Love” (Foi = faith)

      1. My bad. Auto spelling correction I missed uncorrecting.

        Like my son’s soccer coach who asked at the last minute via email if someone could coach that night as he suddenly took ill. He ended his e-mail with the sentence “Sorry for the incontinence” . It wasn’t information we didn’t want to know, just his e-mail correcting the spelling of the word “inconvenience.

  16. I have a magnet on my fridge that I got from an employer as part of a employee information package 3 jobs ago. It advertised EAP which is a free and confidential service for talking to a counsellor of some sort. What is funny is this is communicated as “confidential services”. So I guess it wasn’t really confidential or a service. I’ve kept it all these years for the LOLz.

  17. I find myself contemplating the (English) plural of “solo” (not the Italian “soli.”)

  18. Maybe it’s because I’m from Southern California, but the first thing I thought when I saw the ICE truck was that it was there to pick up undocumented students.

  20. Before looking up a word that one knows not how to spell, one must know that one knows not how to spell the word.

  22. This reminds me of an incident involving the Robert Redford ‘Great Gatsby’ production. As the Paramount representative (whatever that meant) for the film, I’d gone to England where a lot of it was shot. There, looming large over the brilliantly designed fake railroad track outdoor set, was the famous sign Fitzgerald wrote into the book, advertising an eye doctor, with a pair of spectacles, and the line, “The eyes of T.J. Eckelberg, Oculist” (I’m not sure that I spelled Eckelberg correctly, which is especially amusing because:)
    When director Jack Clayton’s secretary typed a version of the script, she spelled “oculist” as “occulist.” And the prop department at Pinewood Studios obediently painted what she typed.
    When Jack came to inspect the set for the first time, he stared for a while at the sign, and said to Hank Moonjean, who was producing the film, “Hank, how do you spell ‘oculist’?”

    Jack had an explosive temper and exploded. However, Hank learned that it’d cost $25,000 (this is in 1970s money) to re-do the sign, so, if you ever see that version of ‘Gatsby,’ you will spot the production’s odd little secret.

  23. I’d just like to get one of the writers of these signs and lead them through the thought processes which lead to their decisions. They seem to make no sense at all.

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