Yay! Go, Teal!!!!

Yay! Go, Teal!!!!

I loved this part of the article"At the Grand Canyon National Park, the men had found a 60-year-old sign with a misplaced apostrophe and a missing comma. They duly whipped out Tipp-Ex and pen, and made the corrections. They then spotted that "immense" was spelled as "emense". They were shocked, but stayed their hands. Mr Deck later wrote: "I was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further.... Still, I shall be haunted by that perversity, "emense" in my train-whistle-blighted dreams."

Yeah, mistakes on signs and movie posters come back to me in my sleep as well.  Ever read the book , "Eats, shoots and leaves"?

Had a uni lecturer whose favourite rant was apostrophes especially on whether the word its is its or it's. One lost marks if used incorrectly. Like correct it is blue can use it's as a contraction. But its raining has to be its.

talk about annoying.

Eh? The raining of it?

It's raining, surely!

And today in Glasgow it wasn't!

About as confusing as the pedantic lecturer. Can't use it's behind rain, one must use its. To lose marks over that I considered ridiculous at the time and still do.

When those Americans who misspell go to hell my mom will be teaching them grammar again and again and again..... to their chagrin

When I make websites I try to replace ' with ’ because it cut-and-pastes better into Word when I can check spelling and grammar.  I even built a utility to strip out the titles out of ABBR, ACRONYM, and A tags in Web pages as well as strip out other metadata so you can spell and grammar check the invisible content too.

That is before you check the HTML and CSS validity and Watchfire Bobby 508 accessibility and after you check that all the links work.

I take accessible Web pages seriously.  


Chris Marsh
DTI Associates
Accessible Web Developer 9 years

Yes Shrek one must be very careful in spelling when programming. my son has borrowed bits of code available on the internet and found out much to his annoyance spelling mistakes within rendering the code unusable till fixed. The school he is going to will be allowing him to attend university early for IT programming as he taught them a thing or two. And showed them some completed programms of his. Mainly emulators to run obsolete programs (each programm has its own sector) plus his unique compression software for flash drives (an invention!!) 2 gig to 250 gig ! Now working on a reformulation programm to allow transmittal of small bits of info and reformation of the full amount automatically at the other end. Uses a major variation of public / private key security protocols. Which is where the idea came from.

I think they'd find lots of spelling and grammatical errors if they came over to Australia. They remind me a little bit of a group called Buga-Up who were active here years ago when it was still legal to advertise cigarettes on billboards. They changed the wording to say that smoking was very bad and killed people and made them sick. I think there were a number of court cases and I haven't heard of them for a long time.

You know, maybe all these grammatical and spelling mistakes could be confusing to foreigners who don't know our language well.  Maybe the Teal people are simply doing acts of reasonable accommodation.

Spanish and English, for example, both have contractions (English has can't equal to cannot, Spanish has al equal to a el (to the) or del equal to de el (from the)).  If you didn't know al and del were legitimate prepositions in Spanish, maybe a non-English speaker would have trouble with can't, don't, shouldn't, won't, etc.

When I was inserting ABBR (abbreviation) tags into documents (when I had extra time to worry), I wrapped abbreviation tags around contractions in English (and even around numerals as well, just in case screen readers could not navigate numerals).  How do you know a given screen reader can handle numerals or contractions?  YOU DON'T!

Especially if you are relying on a computer to translate for you like Clark Griswold was in European Vacation

and the French waiter is taking advantage of him commenting on his wife's anatomy and his daughter's anatomy.... and finally telling him off with an F word

Egad, if my parents and brother and I had been symbolic of a country (maybe symbolic of a country in western or central Europe, as I discussed with rendezvous about Dad's/European secular concept of religion, perhaps both strongly changed by the Holocaust), it would have been an educated country with a better command of English (thanks Mom, the might have been high school English teacher, and Dad, the Federal govt writer editor).

It certainly makes me very annoyed when people who should know better write things such as "the dog wagged it's tail". It is (it's) an incorrect use of the apostrophe which is to denote a contraction. Its isn't a contraction but it's is so what they are effectively saying is "the dog wagged it is tail", which is wrong wrong wrong.

OK its bad enough, well not really unless one is writing an academic research paper that people really can't tell the difference between its and it's. Glaring spelling mistakes on public billboards are not acceptable especially since someone actually had to pay for that mistake. And that its. Or is it it's?

I can pick up mistakes such as the one I said really easily and it annoys the heck out of me. Somebody who's writing an academic research paper certainly ought to have learnt to spell and punctuate properly.