There’s a recycling & skip hire company near where I work which has one of the those big screens with scrolling messages.
One of the messages includes the words:
COMPLIMENTARY FREE GIFT
Oh, really? You’re absolutely sure I don’t have to pay for that, now?
I really shouldn’t let bad grammar in song lyrics get to me, but I can’t help it!
I do listen to an awful lot of music; I have my own personal selection on my MP3 player during the day, and listen to the radio during car journeys and to wake myself up in the mornings.
Sometimes I can manage to ignore the grammatical errors, particularly if the lyric is indistinct, or not repeated in the song. Others make me grind my teeth though – one of those that’s been annoying me for a very long time is ‘between you and I’, in Hungry Eyes from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack (and probably other songs too).
Current irritants are (and believe me, they’re not songs I listen to voluntarily, nor would I even without the bad grammar):
Grrrr. Argh. Anyone got any personal annoyances when it comes to ungrammatical lyrics?
This story has been doing the rounds in Ireland for quite some time, but An Garda Síochána (the Irish police force) have excelled themselves in winning an Ig Nobel prize, for literature too.
Back in February, it was revealed that they’d written more than 50 tickets for driving offences to one person (see the BBC News report at the time) – one Prawo Jazdy, presumably a Polish national (of which there are many in Ireland, driving legally on their Polish licences).
However, Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence…. Can we say ‘oops’? (And either well done or tut tut to all the drivers who got away with those offences.)
I’m a quite a fan of Engrish.com and its associated blogs, even if I’m personally too lazy to post anything to them.
But I was amused by the instructions on a packet of disposable chopsticks that I was given at a Chinese restaurant the other day, and decided that I might as well share them… From the actual nature of the spelling mistakes, I suspect that they were copied from something else by someone who didn’t know Latin characters – putting c instead of e, for example. Makes for entertaining reading though, especially when you’re waiting on your spring rolls and chicken fried rice…
Welcome to Chinese Restaurant.
Please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history and cultual.
Tuk under tnurmb and hcld firmly
Add second chcostick
Hold tirst chopstick in originai position
After featuring that lovely cushion with that interesting I’TS, how could I not smile when I saw a report about soft toy alphabet blocks with worrying misspellings? [See this article in the Guardian.] I especially like the YATCH – even more worryingly, when I tried searching the BBC News website for an article about this, using that spelling, the search brought up a few ‘real’ instances of it…
At least Morrisons are withdrawing all the blocks now (after some pushing) and offering refunds. I wonder if I can get someone to buy that cushion for me, and then take it back with a complaint about the error?
(Hey, I wonder if I can get the price of dishes in restaurants refunded by complaining about the typos on their menus? My latest favourites being pavalova and banoffe.)
Words cannot adequately describe the simultaneous horror and amusement I felt when I spotted this cushion in a local ‘cheap’ shop.
