spelling

oroboros, that is a darling poem! I love the site as well. :)

Sadly ironic video in which Fox News misspells the word "education" during its newscast.

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

--Quoted by Vivian Cook and Melvin Bragg 2004,
by Richard Krogh, in D Bolinger & D A Sears, Aspects of Language, 1981,and in Spelling Progress Bulletin March 1961, Brush up on your English.

More here.

Maybe it's creator was having a bad day.

Maybe it was printed by one of the local's.

Sign, professionally printed, in the Payless Rental Car return lane at the Denver airport:

Please leave "keys" in the car.

You know--keys. *wink wink nudge nudge*

I don't get it...

Sounds as though you're experiencing a stage of Wordie addiction. ;-)

Anti-batrachian has led me to a lamentable word: antimollusque, a French panvocalic describing the action of a molluscicide, which itself has the variant spelling *shudder* molluscacide, also panvocalic. *Can't resist...must list...Arrgh.*

I just don't want to think about the anti-batrachian version. Too squishy.

Ha ha. Depends how you interpret "get", rt. I like your reading though. Free toad for those forced to park on the grass.

I would think it would be pro-batrachian, no?

That is my new favorite comment ever.

To be fair, the sign that says "Park on Grass. Get toad" could be a correctly spelled incitement to anti-batrachian action.

This may be opening old wounds, but check here for a mind-muddling orgy of misspellings and strange grammatical twists (including the ever-popular "random" use of "quotes").

That is truly an excellent visual. We're doomed to giggle at air quotes from now on. :-)

What the bear said. *snicker*

Oh great. Now I'm going to giggle EVERY TIME someone uses air quotes! The mental image of bats trying to climb a glass wall is going to make me use them. Agh!

Using quotes when they're "not needed" is bad, but even worse is when a speaker makes air quotes. They look like bats trying to climb a glass wall.

Ha! That's a "great" site! ;)

In that case, you'll "love" the Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks. ;-)

Or, like the sign I saw the other day:

Lost "Keys"
Please return to... (etc.)

Perhaps the author really did mean that the misplaced object masquerades as keys. AGH!

Skipv, one of my (least) favorites is similar to your example, but mixes up the cases entirely: "I can't believe he did that to her and I." STABBY!! STABBY STABBY!!

Or "Myself and Bob decided not to go." *shudder*

On the nosey, U. It's the same phenomenon that we experience when people say "Bruce was really mean to she and I," but that's another story...

I have to wonder about people who go out of their way to insert unnecessary punctuation. It's easier to type your than you're! It's easier to type locals than local's! It's a two-for-one deal: save yourself the trouble of typing extra characters, AND get the added bonus of being correct. Who wouldn't want that?

A frightened part of me suspects that these people assume using more letters and punctuation marks equals being more grammatically intelligent. Like refusing to acknowledge that its really is the possessive form of it, because it's not as "complete" as it could be.

And the famous "Woman, without her man, is nothing." Changed to "Woman: Without her, man is nothing." :-)

That reminds me of a story (possibly apocryphal) about the wife of Peter the Great (or was it Ivan the Terrible...?) who had a merciful streak as well as being more literate than her husband. She intercepted a note from the emperor to one of his officers about the fate of a man who was imprisoned. The note supposedly said: "Pardon impossible. To be sent to Siberia."

Allegedly the woman changed the punctuation to read: "Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia." And the man's life was saved.

I don't really know or care how true it is. I just thought the use of punctuation to change the meaning was interesting.

Wait. What if we rearranged the punctuation?

"Support! You're Locals."

It's also surprisingly difficult to read, isn't it?

OUCH! That hurts my head!

Suport You're Local's!

I saw this handwritten sign in a window a few days ago. The "local's" referred to are local craft makers. I like it because every word is either misspelled or grammatically incorrect.