It’s really, really hard to read newspapers and magazines when your eyes are unconsiously, unerringly drawn to bad spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You’re looking at a whole page of words, hundreds of them at a time, and BANG! the misplaced apostrophe jumps out and whacks you in the face. I was particularly bothered by one ad I saw in a magazine on Monday, a full page, glossy magazine ad for the Geek Squad at Best Buy, which contained the misspelling “supercede”. I was in fourth grade when I learned how to spell that. How can an advertisement for a national corporation, created by a big-name ad firm and printed in a widely circulated magazine owned by a major publishing firm get all the way to press with that error? How many hundreds of people had to skip fourth grade for that to get printed? Worse still, when I started writing this, I wanted to find a link to the ad, and googled “geek squad” and “supercede”, and got 44 hits. There were 298 when I didn’t put quotation marks around “geek squad”.
On a roll now, I wrote down a few examples of the worst offenders, just from today’s newspaper. First I saw an ad for the opening of a new restaurant, the Riptide Grille. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think about food when I think of a grille, which is the part of a car in front of the radiator. Don’t worry, Riptide Grille, you’re far from the only one to think that adding the e looks more fancy than stooooopid. At least your ad didn’t tell us you were “Dining at it’s best”. Two errors like that in a teensy little ad would have exploded my brain. In the food section of the paper, an article was titled “Factors that may altar scale reading”. That’s for those of you who worship your scale, of course – perhaps you’re also following a fitness regime instead of a fitness regimen, so that makes sense. Whenever I see the phrase “fitness regime”, I picture a country run entirely by crazed aerobics instructors, and it gives me a chuckle.
Finally, I have a couple of entries for the “You don’t have to be smart to be rich” category. Premier Estates, a realty firm that sells high-end properties and almost never includes asking prices (yes, THAT high-end. . .if you have to ask, etc.) had an ad for a property in Bay Head that just had me staring and blinking stupidly for several minutes. The only thing I could think of that would explain it was that it was translated from Japanese. Check this out: “UNTHINKABLE good things can happen” and, “Widows walk to capture sights of dolphins off your own beach, plus glance down and you will note something extreme, tulips coming up in the sand.” and then, “Could this possibly be goal #2? Good things can happen.” I was poised, waiting for something like “happiness in golden good days are health!” Once my head was cleared by another cup of coffee, I continued onward, until I was again assaulted by clear evidence of the non-connectedness of wealth and intelligence in the form of a Provident Bank ad. It read, “Unlike many other banks that offer a free introductory period, and then charge a minimum balance or monthly fee, our checking is really free.” Give it to me straight, Provident, is it a bank, or is it a checking account. The subjects are supposed to agree. I forget how young I was when I learned that. Perhaps that was fourth grade, too. . .
I’m not sure whether the proliferation of bad English in the media is symptomatic of a deficiency in language education, or a contributing cause of it. I’m just thinking that there need to be a lot more proofreading jobs, and they definitely need to be higher-paying than they are (merit-based pay would be nice, too.)