Vigilante grammar

More than just correction… This sad sign gets a grade as well.

Enough said.

Thanks to Ashley Graceless’s thoughtful blog for showing me the way to this gem. I am going to have it emblazoned on the back of my new batch of business cards.

And the award for most incoherent metaphor goes to…

Special thanks to editor Karen Reddick (meet her via her blog and on Twitter) for bringing the B*itch ass industry hater alert to my attention. It is truly the most grandiose editorial casualty I have seen in a long, long time. 

In this tragic piece of writing, blogger Isis defines the top ten types of “haters” that plague the hip-hop recording industry. For example, “the irrelevant hater[s]” . . . “are the cats that sit up on the net all day and because they made some contacts with a few people on the net they think their net worth is something.” (I actually admire the very likely unintentional play on net here.)

Although the entire piece is littered with mixed-up homophones and tortured punctuation (my favorite: “it’s self”), I am willing to forgive (a little begrudgingly) that variety of editorial sloppiness in a blog posting. A blog reflects the author’s personal voice, and, after all, we all own our own grammar. No, I’m not calling out this blog on account of the sad state of its grammatical affairs. 

What’s notable about the B*itch ass industry hater alert is that it is home to the most incoherent metaphor to mar the landscape of Web writing, probably EVER (if you can find one worse, let me know). It describes lucky number seven on the list, the hater known as “the snake.” And here, dear friends, it is:

The Snake - This is the double talking cat whose mouth game is so serious they could sell water to a beach wale.

Oh, the horror! I am beside myself trying to figure out how to even begin detailing the crisis this metaphor is in.

Even if the wale were not a ridge on my corduroy pants but the animal, a whale, and it were beached rather than the typical beach variety, it would most definitely be an easy target for a water salesman, no matter how much double talk was involved. In fact, all a beached whale needs is water. A lot of it, and fast!

I challenge you to find a beached whale who would not spend everything he had on as much water as said snake was able to sell him. And the cat, well, let’s not even involve the cat in this equation.

A special note to Isis, who wrote the post for WordontheStreetsMag.com, subtitled “Hip-Hop’s Voice of Truth”: you can’t hide behind dialect on this one. Providing the caveat “this is hip-hop and I can speak Ebonics today” does not excuse you from being called out for such a linguistic catastrophe. Science is science. 

Go ahead, call me a hater.

Vigilante Grammar

The Beauty of Missing Letters

The idea for this blog evolved from a simple mistake I made when I was typing the name of our online training company, Editorial Courses. My fast fingers skipped the O in Courses, revealing an amusing misprint: Editorial Curses. The mistake not only made me laugh; it also made me think. What a revelation a simple typo can be! The irony of how I had stumbled upon such a clever and appropriate phrase led me to want to put Editorial Curses to good use, hence this blog.

My hope is that Editorial Curses will become the most comprehensive collection of amusing typos on the Web, in addition to a kind of virtual jungle gym for the world’s grammatical nitpickers. If you have a typo to share, please take a photo or transcribe it and e-mail it to me at editorialcurses[at]gmail.com. I will post them all here with attribution (should you want publicity). Over time, I hope to branch the posts out into categories including apostrophes, capitalization, quotation marks, missing letters, and so on.

In the meantime, follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/editorialcurses.