Mr. Noodle

Mr. Noodle
Mr. Noodle

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

spelling fail

The Heinz one, in case you didn't catch it, is like someone misspelling your first name in an email when your first name is in your email address. This has happened to me and it happened a lot.















This one just made me cringe.

It should read 'you're on camera' or 'you are on camera'.

This was, in case you are wondering, the fishing rod section of Canadian Tire in Port Alberni

In the bottom part is a great misuse of 'effect' when they meant to use 'affect'. To affect is to have an impact on. To effect is usually the end result. In fact, I don't think there is any word such as effected or effecting - suffixes following verbs. Something can have an effect, which effectively makes this a noun. See how I turned the noun into an adjective by adding the suffix -ively. This is allowed and it is an actual word.

Another way to look at it is that affect is on the front end of an action. In this example, if you shoplift, we are all affected. Effect in this case can still be use. The effect of shoplifting is that items in this store cost more because they need to pay for security people. It's a subtle difference but an important one.

I abhor bad spelling. It's another thing entirely when words are mispronounced. Yesterday a friend was telling me a story of when her mother was at a conference of academics, and this one speaker kept on referring to something being the epitome of something else. Except she was pronouncing epitome as epi-toam rather than e-pit-o-me. If you are accustomed to being around people who can speak and spell correctly, then hear someone who should know better (I think in this case it was a librarian) mispronounce a word, then suddenly it is all you hear. I start to lose respect for people when stuff like this happens. And what do you do? Do yo say "psst, I hate to tell you this but it's pronounced e-pit-o-me" or do you go on let them looking like an idiot?

2 comments:

  1. ooh, too funny and too true. "epi-toam"! oooooh, like nails on a chalkboard...

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  2. Oh, spelling issues make me want to weep. And I cringe when I see my terrible phone typing and realize that I must look like a moron because of it.

    The biggest pet peeve is the "your" vs "you're" nonsense. I cannot fathom why people do that. *sigh* These are great catches. I can't help but laugh.

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