Calling all grammar pedants!


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.”

grammar-pedant-mug

Comments

  1. 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. 😉

  2. blf says

    An offering to Typos, made all the moar potent by being correct in its other uses on the same fecking mug.

  3. 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”

  4. Holms says

    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.”

    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.

  5. 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.)

  6. 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.)

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