Photo via Wikimedia Commons
It wasn’t widely reported, but The Queen recently made a boo-boo in this year’s official Ascot program(me). “International competition is a compelling feature in the modem era,” she wrote in her foreword. Maybe Buck P hasn’t yet discovered wifi. Or, more likely, one of her young scribes hasn’t yet mastered the art of cursive writing…
The Times picked up the story in its Royal Ascot Diary.
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Tickets issued for President Trump’s first State of the Union address contain a misspelling of the word “Union.”
Sic. (And if you don’t believe us, or Marco Rubio, check Snopes.)
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Photo: Polly Smith on Twitter
It’s amazing how one letter can make such a difference to one’s productivity …
Hat-tip to Polly Smith on Twitter.
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A headline on Saturday in the (appropriately named) Pratt Tribune (sic). As reported by Mashable and others. And yes, there is a paper with that name (although Brits won’t believe it.) At least it has a double ‘t’…
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Would you get away with this name for a juice stall in North America?
Passing through Fulham Broadway Shopping center (in London) recently, I was more than a little surprised to see this juice stall pictured above. “Funky Juice.” It was the American in me that was surprised. Smelly fluids? Rhythmic beverages reminiscent of James Brown and George Clinton? A trendy tasty health drink wasn’t exactly what Funky Juices promised in that moment to me. Continue reading
Portrait of Cod; Wikimedia Commons
In grammatical and usage news this past month: a political email scandal involving risotto and apostrophes; some fishy regional accents, literally; how we’ll all be talking in 50 years’ time; Trump gets it wrong yet again; a British supermarket with a name that’s already been taken (by Iceland, for itself); a dictionary goes online; and those familiar experiences and concepts that desperately need a word or name to describe them … Continue reading
Spot the spelling mistake in this Gap ad …
TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky. And it’s been a while, so we have a number of lingo and language news items from the last few weeks to share today. But before we go any further, can you spot the rather awkward spelling mistake in the Gap ad above? The first person to identify it in the comments section below gets serious Glosso respect. Meanwhile, in the news this month: how commentators in Rio are being accused of turning nouns into verbs; an analysis of the monstrous period at the end of texts; is the word “bitch” still that offensive?; Latin abbreviations removed from a government’s web sites; a task-force cleaning up menu translations in South Korea; and a teacher’s fears about kids’ creativity being crushed by punctuation police. Continue reading
Can you see the curious mistake* in this tag on a popular lunch bag? (And I’m not referring to the headline-case caps; you can read more about cap styling at this earlier Glosso post.)
At the risk of giving away the answer, Glosso finds it slightly strange that it looks like the error of a non-native English-speaker who is spelling phonetically a word pair (and a curious choice of words at that), and the phonetic translation only works if it’s pronounced with a British accent — but the company that produces the lunch bag is U.S.-based. Go figger.
Answers on a postcard please
* Well, Glosso assumes it’s a mistake
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