Grammar Nazi

[crazylegs]

"Five items or less".

OR LESS THAN WHAT?

It's five items or fewer.

Say for example I buy 5 60inch plasma screen TVs, my 82 packs of corned beef will be less than said TVs, but that's not what they mean!

[42_42_42]

And I told ya'll about when I went to vote IN A SCHOOL and the sign on the loo read simply "boy's".

Might explain it all.

Well, while we're on the subject. Y'all is the correct contraction of you and all.

[Amina516]

Half the churches in town say "have a bless day" on their movable type sign.

Maybe they ran out of letters? LOL.

I love reading weird, mispunctuated and grammatically incorrect signs, but never thought to keep track. Maybe Ill start...

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Well, while we're on the subject. Y'all is the correct contraction of you and all.

Dammit.

[RayvenQ]

Amina, I think you'd love Zero Wing then (Siply put, japanese game BADLY translated) which came up with the phrase "All your base are belong to us"

[Andara Bledin]

but I always wanted to whack someone of the insistence that passive voice was somehow 'wrong' for everything ...

I do a lot of writing, and sometimes, the stuff I'm writing is supposed to be in passive voice. Having to tell it to ignore every single sentence in a short story can be really irritating.

Amina, I think you'd love Zero Wing then (Siply put, japanese game BADLY translated) which came up with the phrase "All your base are belong to us"

The fun part is that the "All your base" bit isn't even the worst of it.

That reminds me of another game that had a berry that you would eat that one character said, "it makes the corners round."

It's "Macintosh" not "Mackintosh." "Mackintosh" is a type of raincoat made in Scotland.

And I wasn't going to say anything...

^-.-^

[Moggie]

May I recommend the book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" by Lynne Truss? Fair warning, you may start screaming "The Panda says 'No!'" at random signs.

[slavetotheman]

I love reading weird, mispunctuated and grammatically incorrect signs, but never thought to keep track. Maybe Ill start...

This guy's got you beat: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=87937893

My favorite one from the local bagel store: Try our gourmet "coffee"
If that's a euphemism, I don't want to know

[Megg]

I read the story, and clicked on the guy's blog. I got a paragraph about how it is wrong to deface National Parks, and how egotistical it is to think you can correct another person's spelling. Either he got hacked, or he got busted!

[Fandangoose]

All I can do is shake my head in amazement at the number of people who seem perfectly content to appear illiterate.

[AccountingDrone]

Actually, yeah, passive voice is almost always a no-no. I imagine there are times you might play it for humor or an interesting turn of phrase, but I'd be extremely wary of doing that.

I have seen something written almost entire in passive voice...and not on purpose, either.

Oh, it burns. It FREEZES.

passive voice is frequently called for in articles, not so much fiction. It is hard for someone who had been dead for 500 years and did something 500 years ago to e particularly active ...

[Geek King]

There is a podcast with Penn and Teller and Adam Savage talking in part about publishing books, Penn comments that the publisher will actually put errors into your books.

That sounds like a fun listen. If you have a link to it, please post it. PM me if you don't feel like posting on the thread.

[slavetotheman]

passive voice is frequently called for in articles, not so much fiction. It is hard for someone who had been dead for 500 years and did something 500 years ago to e particularly active ...

If you think about it, if he's been dead for 500 years, the only thing he did 500 years ago was... he died. See? Active voice.

[Sedorna]

passive voice is frequently called for in articles, not so much fiction. It is hard for someone who had been dead for 500 years and did something 500 years ago to e particularly active ...

Ya know, I was just about to write a correction of your supposed error and then I realized...that was a joke! You got me good.

[Lyra]

Recently there was this stupid little Facebook quiz that I took. It was all questions about using they're, their, and there.

I received 100%.

I am not an English major, and I don't do anything with grammar or punctuation for a living, but the glaring mistakes bother me to no end.

My husband doesn't believe in punctuation or proper capitalization. Drives me completely buggy.

Mind you, sentence structure is beyond me in most cases, but I can usually punctuate the thing properly.