Sunday, September 07, 2008

Tha Speling Poleece R Haveing Funn Hear

I've been making fun of misspellings on business signs since pretty much the earliest days of this blog (click the "Silly Signage" tag at the bottom of this post to see more). But today, the Dallas Morning News got into the act, and they're having a lot of fun with it:
A cup of regualar coffee sounds like the perfect way to start your day.

Wouldn't some cheep gas be nice? But if you park your car, you've been warned: No in-and-out priviliges.

These mangled spellings – on real-life signs around the Dallas-Fort Worth area – underline the obvious: Spelling isn't always high on our list.

And our grammar ain't that good, too.
And I think I forgot to blog about this one a while back, but some people are becoming the Grammar Police on their own:
Last month, two men were sentenced to probation and banned from national parks for a year after getting busted for fixing errors on a sign in Grand Canyon National Park.

The men travel the country correcting signs as part of the Typo Eradication Advancement League.

And, yeah, they might have crossed the line by messing with a historical sign in a national park, but they've got a point.

Across the country and locally, our land is littered with signs, posters, ads, menus – you name it – that are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.

In some cases, human spell-checkers battle these boo-boos by fixing the errors on their own. Others snap pictures and trash the typos on their blogs.
Yup, the latter sure applies here.

Read the whole thing, which has some really funny examples, including one that I've blogged about before: A mangled version of the word "inconvenience" (which, this time, comes out as "inconveinance"). There are also some great examples of mangled grammar in school term papers, as collected by an SMU writing instructor with the great Grammar Police name of "Diana Grumbles."

And, as I've asked on earlier posts on this subject, please feel free to submit your own examples of silly signage or garbled grammar in the comments.

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