TO/TOO/TWO TUESDAY for March 31, 2009 (2 of 2)

The Homonym FAILboat has taken a little trip to visit Red Pen, Inc. today. This screen capture, which KARA took for us, was found on a kayaking website. (Apparently our FAILboat in this instance is a kayak.)

I'm a little concerned about what these kayakers do once they're out on the water, though. I'm not concerned at all about the paddling they do; that's to be expected. It's this business of how they "meat other paddlers" that concerns me...

Thanks, KARA, for finding this one!

TO/TOO/TWO TUESDAY for March 31, 2009 (1 of 2)

RANIELLE sent in this amusing homonym snafu. When I first saw the article, I wondered if Ms. Lohan had managed to crash into a Hallmark kiosk or something. Y'know, stationery? But alas, it had nothing to do with actual stationery and everything to do with yet another writer who cannot keep from screwing up his homonyms. Sigh.

(In case you hadn't guessed by now, the writer totally should have used the word stationary. As in, not moving.)

Thanks, RANIELLE, for spotting this one!

"WTF Grammar": Extreme Edition

I don't even know where to begin with this picture that CRANE sent me. See, the whole article kind of really makes me want to cry because I have a special place in my heart for dolphins; after all, they're one of my sorority symbols, they're smart, and they're so damn cute with their smiley, happy mouths. So when I see that dolphins are the victim of some absolutely hellacious writing skills, I get sad.

There are a ton of agreement issues, nonsensical sentences, and misplaced modifiers here. Some of my personal favorites (ie, the parts I loathed the most):

The dolphins are facing a problem every day: "Staying awake to keep breathing while they sleep or die..."
While they sleep or die? I'm thinkin' they'll choose sleep...

To dolphins, breathing is a voluntary act, not reflection, as with men.
Uhhh...what?

“If you do not breathe, they die,” said Jon Kershaw, head of the aquarium Marineland in Antibes, on the French Riviera.
You guys, keep breathing. If you do not breathe, apparently dolphins die. And I'm pretty sure that if you stop breathing, causing dolphins to die, you'll have some bad karma coming your way...

Thus, some dolphins sleep eight hours a day, which stretches between several minutes and lasts two hours.
Paging Daniel Faraday...please explain this weird time-related issue (or go find Sawyer for me--he's my constant, and my nose is starting to bleed...).

According to a study by neurobiologists at the University of California (UCLA), youth who are caught dolphins living in captivity remain awake 24 hours a day the first few weeks of his confinement, while mothers are constantly monitored so it does not sleep.
And again...what? The fuck? Are you talking about? Sigh.

My head hurts now.

Thanks, CRANE, for finding this one!

MISSPELLING MONDAY for March 30, 2009

I was thrilled when BRIDGETE sent in this picture, which she took at a CVS Pharmacy, because it gives me a great excuse to talk about how much I effin' hate that store. Every time I go in there for anything, I'm sort of stunned by how it seems like the employees have gotten more incompetent since the last time I was there. Anytime I pick up a prescription from there, it's a total nightmare (I wouldn't go there except that it's the closest pharmacy to my house, and it happens to be conveniently located right by the mall). The pharmacy employees I've handed a prescription to have forgotten to put it in for processing (despite the fact that I'm sitting in the waiting area, waiting for it), have put it on hold for next time even though I need it NOW and have said as much, have given me grief about transferring prescriptions from one CVS to another, have (on many occasions) royally screwed up the number of refills available to me, etc. The kicker is that the CVS I go to has a bunch of framed "customer service award"-type things hanging on the pharmacy wall. That's incredible, since the only kind of customer service I've gotten there has been rotten customer service.

These spelling errors came from BRIDGETE's CVS, not mine, but it looks like the intelligence level of CVS workers doesn't vary too much between states. It's nice to see that someone tried to fix the (mis)spellings of "without" and "consent," but I guess they missed "photographer"...

Thanks, BRIDGETE, for finding this picture (and for giving me a good excuse to rant)! And dear readers, have you had really annoying experiences at CVS, too? Surely I can't be the only one...

I wonder why her name's so difficult to spell...

I'm pretty sure most guys who had a crush on Ms. McKellar back in the day could at least manage to spell her last name correctly...unless, of course, they were using that pesky 50% rule again.

Who were your celebrity crushes when you were young? (And can you/could you spell their names properly? I'm betting you can/could!)

Can you tell I'm excited about baseball these days?

Later on today, I'll be drafting my third team of BILFs (my second draft, on Thursday, netted me some good players, including Joe Mauer, A-Rod, Chase Utley, Tim Lincecum, and Cliff Lee, just to name a few). I have a feeling that having three fantasy baseball teams this year will make me a tad more obsessive than usual about fantasy baseball. We'll see. This time around I want Josh Hamilton and Justin Morneau on my team...hopefully I'll get at least one of them.

To celebrate my final draft (yay!), here's a funny baseball-related nonsensical sentence, courtesy of fellow BILF aficionado CRANE. The sentence in question says, "Making his since August surgery on his throwing arm, future Hall of Famer Tom Glavine had good command Saturday in a solid three-frame outing." CRANE wonders, Making his what since August, exactly? Someone needs a noun.

Which baseball team(s) are you rooting for this year? I'm rooting for my Phillies, of course...also for the Twins, because I simply cannot get enough of Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, and Joe Natahan (quick, somebody get me a cold shower!). I'm also rooting for Anybody Who Beats the Mets...whoever that is, I like them, too!

(Thanks, CRANE, for spotting this silly error!)

FOODIE FRIDAY for March 27, 2009 (post 2 of 2)

ERICA, who sent in this funny picture, wonders, If I eat this chicken, will I always be hungry?

Now that's food for thought! And the copy next to the product picture was very obviously written by a fool.

Thanks, ERICA, for spotting this one!

FOODIE FRIDAY for March 27, 2009 (1 of 2)

Apparently the Department of Redundancy Department decided to get in on the Foodie Friday action (although the error really doesn't have anything to do with food except that the business that made the error is a grocery store).

Red Pen, Inc. reader AUGUSTO notes, After passing along some compliments and one complaint to Superfresh, I get this response at their website. It seems they were unable to decide if the message was 'successfully emailed' or 'emailed successfully'. Evidently, quite the conundrum.

This reminds me that I should probably hit up the grocery store at some point soon. I usually only remember to go to the grocery store when I run out of fresh veggies, cherry Kool-Aid, and Easy Mac. My fridge is looking pretty barren lately... But my grocery store kinda scares me because the aisle where frozen novelties like ice creams and sorbet are kept...is labeled Deserts (no joke!).

Thanks, AUGUSTO, for finding this amusing picture!

There's no doubt in my mind that this needs a hyphen...

ChicagoLady says: I received the attached in an email from Citibank. It looks like the group No Doubt is now reformed, but how did they reform? Did they start attending church? Have they stopped using swear words? I'm not a huge No Doubt fan, but even I know they re-formed. Maybe they should have stuck with the phrase "got back together"?

It wouldn't surprise me if Gwen Stefani started attending, for instance, The Church of Stylish Handbags, or maybe The Church of Cutie-Patootie Children (seriously, the kids she's had with Gavin Rossdale *swoon* are a-freakin'-dorable!). But I think it's much more likely that this writer forgot to include the hyphen and/or didn't realize that a better term to use here would have been re-formed...

Thanks, ChicagoLady, for finding this one!

I BET THEIR COPY EDITORS DIED ON OCEANIC 815 for March 26, 2009

I BET THEIR COPY EDITORS DIED ON OCEANIC 815 is the newest weekly feature on Red Pen, Inc. It's a combination of recapping last night's episode of Lost and mocking some Lost-related bad writing. We can only assume that the publications whose writing is featured here must have had copy editors aboard Oceanic 815, and once the plane crashed and the copy editors died, the cheap-ass publications didn't hire anyone else to replace them...which results in the crappy writing/grammar/spelling found in this feature.


This Lost-related error comes from MAGGIE. This is a particularly irksome error since, despite the fact that our beloved James "Sawyer" Ford (or LaFleur, as he's known to his Dharma pals) is kind of a redneck, we know that if he wrote the term y'all, he'd have properly apostrophized it. How do we know that? Well, because he's effin' awesome, that's why. So there. :)

So. Tonight's episode. For the first 55 minutes, I was all like, "Ho-hum. When's something gonna happen?"

And then, bang! Something did happen. Sayid shot Little Ben!

So, dear readers, I'm thinking Sayid did this because he figured that he could change the past, and if he killed Ben before Ben killed anyone else, then lots of lives could be spared...right?

(But let's face it, Big Ben is obviously still running around in present-day time. So yeah, Sayid shot Little Ben...but what did that really accomplish?)

Hasn't a certain adorkable (and no, that's not a typo) Mr. Faraday has said before that you can't change the past...?

So can you or can't you change the past? And if you can change the past, then what happens to the future? Some sort of wrinkle in time happens, perhaps?

Speaking of wrinkles in time, didn't a lot of things about this episode seem eerily familiar? Such as how Ilana seemed very Ana Lucia-like in her scene with Sawyer and the boots...the Dharma dude who was the torturer seeming just as composed as out favorite Iraqi ex-torturer...there were other things, too, but I'm having trouble recalling them right now (can you think of any others?)...

And who lit the damn Dharma bus on fire and rammed it into the house? Why did that person do that?

What's your take on this episode? Sound off in the Comments section!

So far, fantasy baseball's been very, very good to me...

In honor of fantasy baseball officially starting for me (had my first draft last night, and I draft in other leagues on Thursday and Saturday because I'm freakin' crazy) and the regular baseball season starting soon, I figured I may as well do some baseball-themed posts this week! :)

This picture comes to us from CRANE, who also does fantasy baseball. I'm a little horrified at the homonym snafu, but I'm thrilled that the homonym error was found in a paragraph about a Mets pitcher. As you may remember, I get really cranky when someone puts any sort of grammatical or spelling-related errors anywhere near the names of my Phillies...

In case any of you are interested, here's my roster for the 2009 BILFs, league #1. I actually SCREAMED with joy when I got Cole Hamels (aka King BILF) again this year. I also managed to get last year's 2 MVPs (Pujols and Pedroia), an excellent closer and great catcher, and more. And this year I have 9 hot ballplayers on the roster (I definitely didn't have that many last year!), so this is an improvement... :)

HUMP DAY GRAMMAR for March 25, 2009

Gross: Typing "under ware" instead of underwear.

Grosser: Misspelling the word etiquette.

Grossest: The thought of skid marks in edible underwear. Ewww!

(Hope none of you guys were eating breakfast while reading this post!)

Happy Hump Day, everyone! ;)

Sailboat? No, this principal seems better acquainted with a FAILboat...

Click on the picture to enlarge the text.

Sorry--Blogger wouldn't let me make it any bigger than this size...

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent in this crazy picture. Our anonymous reader says: This was in our school newsletter...written by the principal...where I work! Sadly, this sort of communication is not uncommon among the faculty...

In this brief communication, I spotted a bunch of apostrophe catastrophes (sailin' should be apostrophized, and this principal never apostrophized it), "sail boat" written as two words instead of as one word, weird spacing, too many exclamation points, weird language/awkward sentence structure...

I see that the principal obviously doesn't proofread stuff he or she sends to the faculty, but I do hope the principal has someone proofread the things he/she writes for the parents or students!

Thanks to our anonymous reader for this frightful picture!

TO/TOO/TWO TUESDAY for March 24, 2009

I suspect that people are so pissed about the new Facebook layout (and with good reason, considering it kinda sucks) that they're taking out their anger on Facebook by capturing lots of instances of bad grammar and sending them to me so that I can mock Facebook here on this blog. :) I've seen a big jump in the amount of Facebook-related posts people are sending my way. Here are a few of my favorite reader-submitted Facebook grammar disasters...

Fellow baseball fan CRANE sent this one in time for To/Too/Two Tuesday. She says: "Weather" or not they were "conscience" of their error...it's there, and it's glaring. This is a Facebook ad that I saw a few minutes ago. They should probably try to proofread more carefully if they want me to go to their club--at least they spelled "conscience" correctly (no small feat).


PETER sent in this amusing error. He says: I took a Facebook quiz called "Where You Should Live." On the last question, I selected an answer that said I am "wordly." The author probably meant "worldly" but I answered as if "wordly" were a word. The quizmaster performed its calculation and concluded that I should live in Italy, perhaps a penalty for giving a snide answer. Or a reward.


(I took that same quiz and it told me that I should be living in Japan. That's good news since I like Hello Kitty and Japanese candy, but bad news since I really wanted to be living in London so that I could shop at Topshop, see all my favorite British bands in concert, and listen to hot accents all day long. Sigh.)

And finally, LAURA sent me a whole gigantic mess of errors that I can barely stand to look at because they make me want to cry. But if I'm gonna be subjected to 'em...well, misery loves company, so enjoy. ;)



I think I need a drink now. I don't care that it's early in the morning; hand me that shot glass and the Smirnoff, please...

Thank you to LAURA, PETER, and CRANE for sending in these funny Facebook-related errors!

MISSPELLING MONDAY for March 23, 2009

One of the reasons I find the DEAR ABBY column to be such a charming read is because the grammar--both Abby's and the letter-writers' grammar--is usually excellent. Sure, the language is often a little more formal than in most other things I read, and I don't always agree with the advice, but I do think it's a charming, well-written column.

I've often wondered how much Abby or her "people" edit the letters that people mail in, because I'm certain that not all Abby's readers are grammarians and that those letters must show up in Abby's mailbox with some mistakes in them. From a letter posted in today's Dear Abby column, it looks like my theory holds true--nope, not all Abby's readers are grammarians. "Severally" isn't a word*, but apparently today's letter-writer thought it was. I'm certain the person meant to use the word "severely"...but that's not what the letter says!

I'm surprised that Abby and/or her people didn't catch this mistake--as I said, they're usually really good about keeping grammar/spelling errors out of her column. But this just goes to show that even people with excellent grammar/spelling aren't perfect all the time! (Hell, today it took me three tries to type MISSPELLING MONDAY as the headline for this blog. The first time, I typed "MODAY" and the second time I typed "MONDY"...sigh.)

* Note: It is a word (see Oliver's comment), but it also appears to be used weirdly at best, or (at worst) in the wrong context.

An em-bear-assing homonym error...

I wasn't home to watch Desperate Housewives last night, so to any of you who did watch it...can you tell me if Edie died a grisly death or a grizzly death (the former being at the hands of her husband, the latter being at the...paws of a big bear)? The article above makes it seem like it's Edie's husband who offs her, but then there's that word grizzly, misleading me into thinking that perhaps Edie got eaten by a big ol' bear...

Has anyone seen this headline's missing verb?

There's this wonderful thing called a verb. Someone should inform this writer that headlines and sentence often sound/look better when these magical things called verbs are included there. In this case, the word "are" would have been a brilliant addition to the headline. As it stands, this headline is definitely less than brilliant--dim, in fact (the writer, at least, is probably rather dim...).

Thanks to KIM for spotting this one!

Apparently this writer was haunted by the Ghost of Grammatical Woes...

So I spent last night writing part of one of my three (!!!) short stories. (OK, I spent part of last night buying more hooker shoes. I'm not really a hooker, of course, but you'd assume otherwise if you saw my shoe collection. But after the shoe shopping, then I did some writing...) The story I'm working on now is about someone who's haunted, which inspired me to post these little blurbs that were littered with errors. These blurbs deal with haunted places, not haunted people, but whatever. At least I can say I have fewer (um, nonexistent) grammar/spelling errors in my working draft right now. ;)

This one's got an obvious set of typos. The writer most certainly meant to say by, but 2/3 of the time, that's not actually what he said here... And did the ghost hanging out by the bed spook the writer so badly that he thought he'd try to scare it away with some heinous non-agreement?

This one contains a cute little homonym error. The word vile is an adjective; the writer should have used the word vial (a noun) instead. And not content with just giving us a homonym error, the writer was so kind as to throw in a minor apostrophe catastrophe, probably figuring we'd get bored if there was only one boo-boo in this blurb...

So now that I'm on this topic, what do you guys think about the idea of stuff being haunted? Do you think people, places, and/or things (or all of the above) can be haunted? Ever had any interesting supernatural experiences? (I have...but that's another story for another time.) Talk to me in the Comments section...

Where do I begin...?

This crazy flyer was sent in by the lovely LadyStyx. She says: This one isn't much but since it was on a flyer that was MAILED TO COUNTLESS HOUSES in the Manassas area, I thought I'd send it along. On the flip side of the flyer, they managed to spell the street name right. Yet on the side with the ad printed they only managed to get a 50% success rating. Granted it's the smaller of the two, but wouldn't you think that they'd at least manage to get it spelled the same (correctly or not) when it's printed on the same side of the card? I'm just sayin'...

Very good points, LadyStyx! But unfortunately, that's not all that's wrong with the flyer...

* Haircuts is one word. Or at least it should be...sigh.

* "Man's Coloring" just sounds kinda awkward here, doesn't it?

* Is it $7.99 for a man or a boy, or for a man or boy to get a haircut? If it's just $7.99 for a man or a boy, that could be a very good deal, depending on the pool of men to choose from. If that's the case, I'll ask for Josh Holloway and Joe Mauer, please...getting both of them for under twenty bucks would be the bargain of the century! ;)

Thanks, LadyStyx, for finding this amusing flyer!

FOODIE FRIDAY for March 20, 2009

OK, Melting Pot. This is gettin' bad. Now you're a repeat offender--twice in one month! If only your grammar could be as good as your delicious food is...

This picture comes to us from JADE, who says, I just received this lovely you're/your grammar mistake in my email from The Melting Pot. I demand a free pot of fondue for the email putting this mental stress on me.

I like JADE'S idea! Wouldn't it be fun to see if area businesses that use crappy grammar would trade goods/services for help fixing up their e-mail blasts/menus/signs/etc? Hmmm...now that's food for thought!

Thanks, JADE, for spotting this one!

Monkeying around with typos and headlines...

Red Pen, Inc. reader TOM G. sent in this picture, which just might be the funniest reader submission I've received all week. TOM notes, I guess the former president will still get the blame [for the tourists dying in the bus crash].

Well, not only is the former president getting the blame for that incident, but I see that the AO-Hellraisers posted a nice mug shot of said former president to the left of the headline in question. Cute! (Here's a question for you guys--is this a legitimate mistake/typo, or the handiwork of a smartass liberal who works for AOL? Hmmm...)

Thanks, TOM, for finding this hilarious error!

I BET THEIR COPY EDITORS DIED ON OCEANIC 815 for March 19, 2008

I BET THEIR COPY EDITORS DIED ON OCEANIC 815 is the newest weekly feature on Red Pen, Inc. It's a combination of recapping last night's episode of Lost and mocking some Lost-related bad writing. We can only assume that the publications whose writing is featured here must have had copy editors aboard Oceanic 815, and once the plane crashed and the copy editors died, the cheap-ass publications didn't hire anyone else to replace them...which results in the crappy writing/grammar/spelling found in this feature.



Thanks to MAGGIE for the Lost-related typos and errors. It's too bad I can hardly pay attention to said errors/typos because I am STILL FREAKING OUT ABOUT LAST NIGHT'S EPISODE OF LOST.

No real recap this week, because I have more questions than I have answers. For instance:

* What. The. Fuck? In general. WTF?!?

* What's gonna happen when Little Ben meets up with Big Ben?

* Why did Sun not "disappear" with the rest of the Oceanic 6? (And didn't Ben kind of look surprised that she hadn't disappeared?)

* Sawyer's all responsible, thinking ahead, saving lives...awesome. :) What will become of him and Juliet now that Kate's back on the island?

* How pissed is Jack that he's gotta work in the shed? LOL.

* Sawyer alluded to Faraday having been with them but that he wasn't there "...anymore." Where is our favorite mad scientist, then?

* What the hell is up with the Dharma house/Christian cabin? It looks a lot like Jacob's cabin, but I think it's a different cabin. And how did Christian get that photograph so quickly? And why does Sun have "a long journey" to get to Jin?

* The Oceanic 6 who were on the plane and now Sawyer all think Locke is dead. But we know Locke's probably wandering around that island. Where do you think he is, and what is he doing?

* And what's Ben in such a hurry to get back to? Do you think he knows it's 1977 now? (By the way, how awesome was it when Sun clocked him with an oar?)

Thoughts, theories, more questions, answers...let's talk Lost! Sound off in the Comments section.

It's an extra apostrophe extravaganza...

I've seen an alarming trend lately in apostrophes hanging out in places in which they really shouldn't be hanging out. Here are two of my favorite reader-submitted examples of this annoying phenomenon...

The first apostrophe boo-boo comes to us from the lovely MRS. X. She says: I have to share this with you so I can vent to somebody about it! I was driving my husband's car the other night and listening to his satellite radio, when THIS craziness came on the screen (please ignore the fact that you want to laugh because I listen to country music and that I just snapped a picture with my phone). This randomly happens a couple of times a month, and it's usually about a whole day of the same mistake in every song title that needs an apostrophe. Apparently there are morons working at Sirius Satellite Radio!



Having worked in the radio industry (although never for Sirius), I can personally attest to the fact that there are lots of people in radio who are punctuationally-challenged. ;)

And then this one comes from JUSTIN in Florida. He says: I stumbled upon the following story on The Inquisitr's web site. Figures an organization that can't figure out how to spell its own name would make an error like this...



On a related note, I think if I worked for The Inquisitr, I would go out of my mind looking at that damn misspelling all the time. I'd constantly be tempted to re-spell the company's name; they'd probably fire me for frequently and blatantly adding illegal vowels into the company name...

Thanks, MRS. X. and JUSTIN, for these great examples of apostrophe abuse!

HUMP DAY GRAMMAR for March 18, 2009

Regarding the person who answered this question, I'm going to forgive his/her spelling and punctuation errors just because his/her answer was so damn funny.

As for the person asking the question...well, she doesn't get a free pass. She wasn't funny, her spelling mistakes were really silly, and the question about why he would use a blow-up doll was even sillier!

Happy Hump Day, everyone!

A ballplayer, a ball player, and a player--during his career, Pat Burrell has been all three of these...

Ahhh, baseball. I've been waiting since October for baseball to return. Spring training's happening right now, my fantasy baseball draft happens next week (let's goooo, BILFs!), and hot baseball players are using questionable grammar. Today's example is Pat freakin' Burrell: former Phillies ballplayer, current Tampa Bay Ray, always a player.

Pat did a very, very nice thing: He took out some ad space in the Philadelphia Daily News, and he wrote a thank-you letter to the Philly fans who, um, booed him for a good portion of his career in Philly. This was a sweet gesture. It would have been even sweeter had he called himself a ballplayer as opposed to a ball player...

Now, I'm not saying that using the phrase ball player is entirely wrong. I don't think it's dead wrong. However, after a lot of Googling, I found that people definitely use the term ballplayer more often than ball player. The term ballplayer is also in the dictionary, which means it's actually a real word/term. I think ball player has become socially acceptable terminology, but I don't necessarily think that, given the choice between using ball player and ballplayer in a sentence, ball player would really be the best term to use.

Then again, Pat (in the Rays uniform, on the left) might really have literally meant he's a, um, ball player...

I originally found this picture over at Deadspin.

Ahhhh, good ol' Pat. I'll miss seeing him (and his nice butt) in red and white pinstripes this season, but now I have an excuse to watch Rays games. (He looks just as nice in a Rays uniform, and now Tampa Bay, not my Phillies, must contend with his slowness.) BILFiness* knows no team-related bounds; I may be a Phillies girl at heart, but dammit, I'm a sucker for a hot baseball player no matter which team's uniform he happens to be wearing. (And yeah, BILFs even manage to retain their cuteness when they're messing with their junk on the field.)

* "BILF" is my very own made-up term to describe cute baseball players. It stands for Ballplayers I'd Like [to]...um, there are several "F"-words that could fit here, so pick your favorite. I know what my favorite one is... "The BILFs" is also the name of my fantasy baseball team.

TO/TOO/TWO TUESDAY for March 17, 2009

I guess this blogger figured that if he used each spelling of the word in question (principle and principal), he couldn't be completely wrong; in fact, he'd be half-right!

Unfortunately for him, a score of 50% still constitutes a FAIL.

Happy St. Patrick's Day from Red Pen, Inc.

Here's hoping that if the webmaster who created the above mess of a web page ever finds a freakin' pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, he uses some of that gold to buy a dictionary or, at the very least, a working spellchecker.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! Don't overdo it on the green beer or Shamrock Shakes! ;) Also: I'd like to wish EVula, snarky commentator extraordinaire and official friend of Red Pen, Inc./The Grammarphile, a very, very, very happy birthday!

Somebody get this writer a proofreader costume...

BRIDGETE, who spotted this amusing mistake, notes that "I suppose if you need some grant money to get your play up and running, you might need some costumer support." Ha!

If the mistake just showed up once here, I'd figure it was a simple case of transposed letters (which happens to the best of us...admittedly, it happens to me all the damn time). But no--this mistake happened twice. Twice in the same paragraph, actually. And of course it's the sort of mistake that a spellchecker won't catch. But it's the type of mistake that grammar geeks like us will catch (and mock), isn't it? ;)

Thanks to BRIDGETE for finding this one!

MISSPELLING MONDAY for March 16, 2009

Don't you love it when publications goof up words and phrases? And I don't just mean figuratively--in this case, I mean literally. When "Good Friday" becomes "Goof Friday," that's a pretty big goof, indeed!

Thanks to the fabulous GRANNY GEEK for spotting this amusing error!

Spellchecker FAIL!

This is a good example of why decent proofreaders are more helpful than the spellchecker on your computer. A proofreader would have caught the above mistake, noticing that the sentence was nonsensical as written, and changed that word from paid to pail. Your spellchecker? Not so much!

Somebody needs to create a Meetup group for grammar bitches...

I'm a quirky writer. Not necessarily when I'm dealing with Red Pen, Inc. But I'm a REALLY quirky writer when I'm working on any of my other projects (right now: one novel, one idea-for-the-next-novel, 2 short stories...). I get weird. Like, I'll listen to nothing but Muse (or maybe Beck), replace the regular light bulbs in the lamps near my desk with red ones, won't answer the phone or door for any reason, must light either mint- or cherry-scented candles (but never both at once!), must have my hair up in a bun, must not be wearing shoes, and will get up and pace relentlessly for a minute or two before throwing myself back in my seat and writing another paragraph. (The caffeine, alcohol, or caffeine-with-alcohol that I consume during my writing process doesn't help make me any less bizarre, of course.)

But I digress. The habits of using bad grammar and/or forgetting to include relevant words in sentences are not among my many writing-related quirks. So, no thank you--I would not like to join this Meetup group. Something tells me I wouldn't quite fit in there...

FOODIE FRIDAY for March 13, 2009

What about the word blueberry is so difficult to spell? It's the word blue + the word berry. Both of those words are really simple words. Apparently when people try to combine these two words, though, they run into trouble. Less than a month ago, we saw someone screw up "blueberry" in a different way...and now we've got this. "Bluberry." Which reminds me of the word "blubbery." And to that I say...ewww.

Have a very...umm...fruity Friday, everyone! ;)

I'm sensing some disagreement here...

Oh, really? Is that exactly what the newspaper company said? Just like that? God, I hope not...

Granted, the newspaper industry has bigger problems right now than its apparent lack of talented proofreaders, but still. I'm hoping that the actual newspaper company wasn't responsible for saying this, and that this mistake is the fault of some goober webmonkey who works for the website on which I found this error.

Ironically, I am a webmonkey who works for a newspaper. But at least I'm not that webmonkey who works for that newspaper company!

I BET THEIR COPY EDITORS DIED ON OCEANIC 815 for March 12, 2009

I know, you guys. There was no episode of Lost last night. That made me very, very sad, and I had to go shopping to ease the pain. (Exactly how buying zebra-print sheets, metallic silver leggings, and a new Juicy shirt is supposed to ease this pain, I have no idea, but whatever.)

I was close to having a nosebleed last night--see, Lost (um, more specifically, shirtless Sawyer) is my constant on Wednesday nights, and without that, I was thrown back into 1997. I know this because I randomly started listening to songs by fairly obscure bands I haven't listened to since then--Letters to Cleo, Loud Lucy, the Dandy Warhols...(you're going, who? And I'm like, exactly).

Just in case you guys are having some weird Lost withdrawal symptoms too and you find yourself hurtling through time, allow me to present to you a series of items--perhaps one of these is your constant...

1. Bad grammar. (If bad grammar is your constant, then Red Pen, Inc. is the right place for you!)


And then, for the ladies...

2. Smokin' hot bad boys. Mmm, shirtless Sawyer. God, I missed hearing "son of a BITCH!" this week...


3. Hot tattoos. This isn't even the best picture of Jack (Matthew Fox), but I was having a hell of a time finding a decent one that showed off his tattoos.




4. Hot accents. (I jumped on the Desmond bandwagon this season when he started looking really dapper in the off-island scenes. These scenes beat the hell out of when he's wandering the beach looking like a very unkempt Psychic Jesus.) I could listen to him talk all day long...*swoon*.


5. Dangerous men! OK, so Sayid's really a good person. But he's got a nice aura of danger around him. Admit it--that's hot. (And he wears his muscle shirts well, doesn't he?)


6. The fountain of youth. ...Or at least the dude who seems to drink from it. Oh, Richard Alpert, you intrigue me...


Guys, don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you...

7. Hot chicks wearing nothin' but underwear. (Kate is my favorite of the female characters, but it has nothing to do with how she looks in her underwear.)


8. Blondes! Juliet's not some stereotypical airhead blonde, either. She's a smart cookie, and she usually cleans up nicely...



9. Mud-wrestling chicks! (Kate and Juliet not only mud-wrestled each other, but they're also handcuffed together during the mud wrestling. I don't really see how anyone covered in mud could be hot, but I'm sure several of you guys would beg to differ with me about this...)



10. Soul mates, perfect matches, whatever you wanna call 'em...if you believe they exist, then here's a good example. (Then again, right after THIS part of the scene, Kate goes and bitch-slaps Sawyer. But hey, love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, right?)


By now, I hope your nose has stopped bleeding and that you are safely situated in present time... ;)

Next week's Lost episode is called Namaste. I'm already looking forward to it! What about you?

I think they need to *be* more careful about proofing their web copy...

Shakespeare said "To be, or not to be, that is the question..." In this instance, though, I think the question is "Where's the effin' verb?" or, more specifically, "Where's the be that's supposed to be there?"

Oh, Copyeditors Needed Now (or "CNN" for short)...this is just pathetic.

UPDATED: Just found this link (that links to the same article as "Photo may last of Lincoln before his death" does) on the Copyeditors Needed Now site. This one's no better. Awkward much? Sigh.