Grammar that makes you cringe

[hellymedic]

<<Tweet us your banging picures from the amazing display last night!>>

Usage, spelling & grammar cringes, all in one neat Tweet from Brent Council a few minutes ago.

[Cudzoziemiec]

<<Tweet us your banging picures from the amazing display last night!>>

Usage, spelling & grammar cringes, all in one neat Tweet from Brent Council a few minutes ago.

I think banging is a good pun in the context and the sentence matches the style of the 'tweets' the council hopes to receive.

[eck]

TV ad tonight:
"On 9 November, The House of Bruar commences its once a year annual sale."

Does it really? 

[citoyen]

Is the House of Bruar annual like the Beano annual?

[mattc]

I assume they are selling Beano annuals. And others, I hope.

[rogerzilla]

I know it's not actually grammar but "wattage", "amperage" and (worst of all) "ohmage" grate terribly.  The battle has been lost on "voltage"  ("electromotive force" and "potential difference" both being a bit of a mouthful) but can we please use "power", "current" and "resistance"?

[Cudzoziemiec]

Surely ohmage is what you pay to Caesar?

 

[clarion]

Recognise your age, it's a Teenage Ampage...

[rogerzilla]

And a wattage is a small country house made from straw and mud.

[Tim Hall]

Traffic report at 18:32 today on Magic "And the Tubes are still running good"   

Those'll be the ones that provide the interwebs, presumably?   

Why's traffic report could be related to the presenter on the local community radio station I heard the other day. The one who thought when speaking about a single effigy being burnt on a November 5th bonfire referred to it as a "Guy Fawke", singular.

[Wowbagger]

With a fifth of Ohio’s votes yet to be counted and Obama ahead by a slither,

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/this-election-wasnt-pretty-but-obamas-victory-is-a-triumph-for-science-over-superstition-8294590.html

Edit: actually, that's not a grammatical error. It's just ignorance, but quite a common mistake.

[Pickled Onion]

Yes it's a sort of crossover to the pronunciation thread, where poor enunciation ends up affecting spelling/grammar. One might expect better from the Independent though.

[Deano]

Obama was snaking ahead...

[PhilO]

With a fifth of Ohio’s votes yet to be counted and Obama ahead by a slither,

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/this-election-wasnt-pretty-but-obamas-victory-is-a-triumph-for-science-over-superstition-8294590.html

Edit: actually, that's not a grammatical error. It's just ignorance, but quite a common mistake.

TBF, that strikes me as more likely to be an auto-correct problem, and therefore poor proof reading more than ignorance. Still cr@p, though.

[Wowbagger]

11 years ago our local council wanted to build a road, for which they said they intended to take "a slither" of park land.

Slither is about right where Southend Council are concerned.

[Auntie Helen]

Just checking my parcel delivery status and I see from DPD's website that we have the following stages:

Collected
At Sortation Facility
In Transit
At Delivery Depot
Out For Delivery
Delivered

Sortation???

[Andrij]

Just checking my parcel delivery status and I see from DPD's website that we have the following stages:

Collected
At Sortation Facility
In Transit
At Delivery Depot
Out For Delivery
Delivered

Sortation???

Agreed.  Any fool knows the word is sortification! 

[clarion]

And, once they are sortificationized, they are ready for transitizing.

[Cudzoziemiec]

ITYM "they are preparified".

[citoyen]

Excellent blog post on the old that/which chestnut:

http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/a-comma-which-muddles-meaning/

[drossall]

Has George W Bush gotten himself a new job writificating documents for delivery companies?

Shouldn't that be deliverification companies?

[SandyV]

De-escalate!

[Cudzoziemiec]

De-escalate!

Does that mean take the stairs?

[nicknack]

Excellent blog post on the old that/which chestnut:

http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/a-comma-which-muddles-meaning/

Indeed, but I think I disagree when he says, "nor do they need which changed to that." I'd change them.

[ian]

Excellent blog post on the old that/which chestnut:

http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/a-comma-which-muddles-meaning/

It's always been my contention that the more grammatical people try to be, the less intelligible their writing becomes. We have a couple of writers (OK, all of them) who are like this. You can almost smell the grammatical perspiration, the effort they've put into obeying arcane, arbitrary rules. Those clunkers of an attempt to avoid a split infinitive. Sentences that meander, evidently scared to move forward in case they encounter a terminal preposition. Indecisive commas dumped like literal litter.

Of course, this could be my excuse for being shit at grammar. I make up words all the time too.