Sunday, 31 August 2008

Loosing the War on Error

Other people’s mistakes are funny. Mine are not.

This blog is a place to celebrate the mistakes of others. Specifically, mistakes in language. More specifically, mistakes in English. Most specifically, mistakes in written English.

The pleasure I derive from such errors probably springs from a heady but unhealthy mix of pedantry and schadenfreude, which has me wincing and glorying in equal measure over typos, misspellings, grammatical gaffes and any other lexical cocksoup which comes my way.

For a while now, I’ve wanted a place where I could collect the examples I occasionally happen upon. I know there are other places on the web where similar pursuits are enjoyed – places such as Engrish.com and The Apostrophe Protection Society – but I wanted one of my own. So this is it. I’ll be posting stuff as and when I can, but would obviously be overjoyed to receive any contributions from you. If you have anything you think I and other pedants might enjoy, please send it to me here. Thanks.

Your wonderful.



3 comments:

Mina McKay said...

You're.

You did that on purpose, right?

Sam said...

I saw a sign today at TJ Hughes in Coventry which said "Please do not take any item out of it's packaging", blech.

And at Ikea there was something equally heinous, but I've forgotten it. Oh well.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the current debate raging at Tesco - 10 items or less, or fewer? They've copped entirely out and are going for 'Up to 10 items'.

Anonymous said...

WHY is this blog not called The War on Error? What a fantastic name!