Thursday, August 21, 2014

Bad Spelling and Grammar, Part II


I am always on the lookout for misspelled signs.   I like to show them to my students and have them correct the mistakes.  I also think that this makes them more aware of their own spelling; people do see it and will notice it.

     Before I comment on the ones with pictures, there was one that I unfortunately did not get a picture of, but wish I had.  
It read:

SQAUSH

     This is why my elementary students often hear me ask, “What letter almost always comes after a ‘Q’?  And I always smile when I hear their loud, “U!”  Hopefully when they are older, they won’t have any “sqaush” for sale.  (FYI, one of our favorite words to use when in a bind for Scrabble is "qaid" [a variant of "caid" which is a Muslim tax collector].) That's why I say "almost always".  They know how to use "qaid" in a Scrabble or Banangram game too.)

     I blocked out the name of the proprietor in this picture to protect the not-so-innocent.  

     I don’t know who Brian is, or why he needs to “IMRPQVE”, but he certainly isn’t MY Brian.   Surely they spelled the words like that on purpose?

     My husband and I love to find strange and funny names of Chinese restaurants, like “Happy Lucky”  and “Soon Fatt”.  I’m not sure about the two “t”s in “Fatt”, and I certainly don’t want to get fat soon either.  
     This sign was in the bathroom at a gas station.  At least they spelled “you” correctly, which is more than we can say for that pharmacy.

     This one reads, “ATTENTION Truck buyer’s”, which either means “truck buyer IS if you have a credit score” or that the truck buyer owns the “if you have a credit score”.  Neither one is correct grammar.  The funny thing is, the driver of the truck, as well as his boss who puts the bad grammatical signs on the back of the truck, probably make more money than I do.  Maybe that isn’t so funny after all.
And, these people have “Egg’s” for sale.  Now, either there is only one egg for sale, and it means “egg is [for sale]”, or the one egg owns something, like the “egg’s yolk”, or they do actually have multiple eggs for sale, and they just threw the apostrophe in there for fun.  
     Well, other than my watch, which really wouldn’t qualify as jewelry, I don’t wear much “jewellery”, thank you.  
     Participles, participles!  These are not really “damage” scraps, they are damaged scraps, as in scraps that have been damaged.