Are you, like me, somewhat of a grammar pedant and struggling to find gifts to give certain friends and relatives of yours who consistently say things that annoy you? Mark Frauenfelder has found just the thing. If the recipients spot the typo on the mug, they get a pardon. That error, he tells me, is an example of something called Skitt’s Law that says that “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself.”
cartomancer says
Technically that’s an issue for orthography pedants, not grammar ones!
k1mpatsu says
Wither art thou, “s”?
The thing is, Mano, I couldn’t give my mother a mug with the f-bomb written on it. So try these instead: https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=grammar+pedant+mugs&biw=1920&bih=950&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi9_ovKpPfQAhXJVbwKHWlxBSoQsAQIJQ
Silentbob says
It took a while, but I found it.
Anyway Mano, with all due respect, I’ve been reading you for some time, and if you’ll pardon me saying so, spotting typos isn’t your greatest skill. 😉
blf says
An offering to Typos, made all the moar potent by being correct in its other uses on the same fecking mug.
EigenSprocketUK says
True: anyone who corrects another is won’t to make a mistake of their own. Or two.
DonDueed says
Another one I’ve seen a lot more often recently:
LEAD = a metallic f’n element
LED = past tense of f’n “to lead”
Holms says
Which is pretty much just Muphry’s Law, which in turn is the narrow case of Murphy’s Law applied to editorial criticism.
Another irritating trend I have seen lately is there’s being used as a contraction for there are.
EigenSprocketUK says
Holms#7- where I grew up, plural there’s was widespread colloquial speech. There’s loads of examples from my childhood because it’s so difficult to say there’re. (I hope this is the only time I wrote it down.)
Mano Singham says
cartomancer @#1,
I salute you, you are a pedant about pedantry, a metapedant!
Johnny Vector says
Someone once accused me of pedanticness. I explained to them that the word was “pedantry”.
(That joke doesn’t work so well at this point in the thread, but one or more of you might not have heard it so I figured I’d put it here anyway.)
fledanow says
cartomancer @ #1
But but but… there’s that split infinitive, too!