Monday, November 2, 2009

Niggles & nitpicks

For a start, a funny thing from HuffPo on those odd, 'random' quotation marks used by the benighted. They are funny photos of signs, available for your amusement here. The what-the-hell? quote mark is one of life's little mysteries, along with 's as a plural form.
And then a couple of goofy usages from comment sections on sites:
'They need to have a cattle prawn when we land …' [would that have something to do with the surf-n-turf?] and '… he is just trying to get everyone's goad.' [That one, you suspect the writer was almost in the right neighborhood and just went a little astray.]

5 comments:

Kari said...

Yes, the apostrophe seems to be rampant in places where it doesn't belong nowadays. Also, in comments on blogs, I've been noticing that some people are using the * to indicate italics (I think) as in "I really *love* your new hat."

Having worked as a proofreader, I can't help but notice certain things, but then, I'll have to admit, as soon as I publish one of my own posts, I will see errors that I didn't catch beforehand. I keep sneaking back in and trying to correct my own self!

Kari said...

P.S. I've been using this ~ instead of this -. I like the curvy look of ~ better. I can't think of what this mark ~ is called.

(And yes, I do know my sentences above break any number of punctuation rules, but I couldn't figure out how to express the thought, or lack of thought, any other way.)

And what is happening to all the capital letters, by the way?? They are falling off the map right and left.

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Anonymous said...

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