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Misspellings which make you mad.

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12:31 / 02.02.05

Hyphens. When should you use them?

In particular, when should they be used when giving someone's age?

'Smoothly is a 29-year-old'?

'Smoothly is 29-years-old'?
or
'Smoothly is 29 years-old'?
or
'Smoothly is 29 years old'?

Something I found via Google gave me this:

Hyphenate ages when they are adjective phrases involving a unit of measurement: 'Her ten-year-old car is beginning to give her trouble.' A girl can be a 'ten-year-old' ('child' is implied). But there are no hyphens when outside of such an adjectival phrase: 'Her car is ten years old.'

I'm not sure how repectable this advice is, and I'm not sure I understand it anyway. In the last example, 'ten years old' is still adjectival, isn't it?

Can anyone advise on the how and why?

farseer /pokes out an i

13:39 / 02.02.05

There's a friend of mine that gets his panties all abunch when I misuse "then" for "than". Which happens more often than I'd like.

8P

14:31 / 02.02.05

Smoothly - I'me not sure I can help you on the why, brane not in fast mode, but I think the correct forms are:

'29-year-old Smoothly'

'Smoothly, a 29-year-old [man, woman, rabbit]'

'Smoothly, who is 29 years old'

14:47 / 02.02.05

Thanks K-Cat. That's roughly what I thought. Hyphenated when used as an adjectival phrase before the noun (like 'out-of-work actor'), or like other compound nouns where the emphasis falls at the beginning (like 'chip-shop').

What if, newspaper-style, the sentence was:

'Smoothly, 29 years old, was involved in a fatal grammatical accident.'

Does that need hyphens? (assuming you don't just write 'Smoothly, 29, was involved...')

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:04 / 02.02.05

Well, quite. Why on Earth would you write "Smoothly, 29 years old"? If you did, though, you wouldn't hyphenate it.

Think of it as like "real time".

A real-time event is an event taking place in real time. A 29-year-old man is a man who is 29 years old.

15:19 / 02.02.05

Yup, yup, yup.

Sorry, one more hyphen question:

'Smoothly is a father-of-two' or 'Smoothly is a father of two'?
And does it make a difference if you tack 'children' on the end?

19:13 / 02.02.05

No hyphens in there, dude.

20:05 / 02.02.05

Cool. Cheers cube.

'Father-of-two Smoothly' thus, though. Yeah?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:39 / 02.02.05

Yup. If you're a character in a tabloid, you're "father-of-two Smoothly". If you're actually a person in real life, you're "Smoothly, father of two".

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:41 / 02.02.05

Unless, of course, you're a "pretty blonde". In which case, your kids will only turn up in a much later paragraph designed to rip emotion from the reader like Sellotape from an eyebrow.

23:16 / 02.02.05

i love going through the '8 items or less' aisle at my nearly-local big supermarket (wouldn't dream of this at my nice [smaller] local one...) with lots of items [only when it is fairly quiet - i may be a twat, but not that much!]...

i then argue that their directive is quite meaningless, but that i would be delighted to obey signage that read '8 items or fewer'. usually i get blank stares. what do they teach in schools these days?

20:10 / 03.02.05

the bad spelling and grammer mistakes I always hate are those I notice in my replies to threads inbetween hitting the "post reply" button and the page changing

rising and revolving

20:00 / 04.02.05

Just saw this one yet a-fucking-gain and it reminded me.

Pique. The subject does not peek your interest, neither does it peak your interest.

Bah!

23:24 / 04.02.05

i love going through the '8 items or less' aisle at my nearly-local big supermarket (wouldn't dream of this at my nice [smaller] local one...) with lots of items [only when it is fairly quiet - i may be a twat, but not that much!]...

Can someone do me a favour and explain this one for me, assuming it makes sense?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:10 / 05.02.05

If it's something that can be enumerated (for example "items"), then it's "fewer". Fewer items.
If it's not- say it's something like "oil", then it's "less". Less oil.

For some reason I dislike the word "fewer", though.

10:37 / 05.02.05

The thing that annoys me the most is when people get there, their and they're; or your and you're confused. There was a clothes shop that I used to walk past every lunchtime and they had a sign up saying "twinkle twinkle your the star" and each time I saw it I got more and more angry. Making a mistake is one thing but if you're a sign designer you really ought to check these things.

16:15 / 05.02.05

I really get annoyed by the misuse of "cliche" as if it were an adjective. "That's a very cliche idea." NO NO NO!

It's a clicheD idea.

This made it on to a departmental test written by a colleague of mine. Luckily, I didn't know who, for sure, was responsible. Otherwise, well, death would be too kind.

My favorite error of this sort was when a student, completely unaware of the brilliance of the idea, said, "Jane Eyre took everything with a grain of assault."

She said, when I asked her about it, "Oh, I just meant she was really laid back." ARRRGGHHH.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:27 / 05.02.05

One day, work types who fling around the word "criteria" like it's pizza dough on the Generation Game will realise it's a plural.

Until that day, keep them away from me.

18:36 / 05.02.05

Pique. The subject does not peek your interest, neither does it peak your interest.

Yes. And more generally, I hate to hear/read the improper use or spelling of some ten-cent vocabulary word when a simpler word would have sufficed. If you don't know how to say it piqued your interest, just say it looked interesting. We're all guilty of this, but still... it's irritating.

Actually, though, this reminds me in a funny way of the moment I'd totally had it with all the picky writer types in the world. I was on the editorial staff of a certain failed online magazine, and we were critiquing a piece whose author was not present. The group got into a bitter debate that went on and on... about the use of "nevertheless" versus "nonetheless." The author had used the latter, and certain staffers were up in fucking arms insisting we change it to the former. I just sat there thinking, we have gone too far.

02:35 / 06.02.05

True. However, there is something that makes you go funny about interchanging "rain", "rein", and "reign" EVERY fucking day for people whose writing is supposedly worth three times your own.
Grr.

odd jest on horn

07:57 / 08.02.05

"Wierd".
No! Even though the rule says "i before e, except after c", it's only half the rule, and even then it's got myriad exceptions! Temple-folk! Weird is the single most used adjective in Temple, learn it by heart. Use a spell checker. There's no "wierd".

"Diety"
There.is.no.such.thing.as.Diety. GAH!!! I might turn this dire situation to my advantage by creating a servitor named "Diety". Whenever ze's invoked, I will get supernatural help in attaining a healthy weight.

16:16 / 08.02.05

Oh joy! I have been waiting to share my pain about this hideous mistake I couldn't help noticing at least 10 times every fucking day while I was working in Seldfridges this Christmas.

They had this teeth-grinding Christmas campaign that involved such luminaries as Natasha Bedingfield and Sharon Osbourne writing, um, Christmas stories that were collected in a little book. For charity, as these awful endevours so often are. To add to the horror of such a concept they then made big, illustrated signs with snippets of said stories upon them. Going up the escalator I was often forced to witness one of these signs:

'She stood on tip-toes eagarly awaiting the conductors decision'.

(See, see? Doesn't the fucking decision belong to the conductor? And his stray apostrophe?)

GAAAAAARGH! Every fucking day I felt like going into Visual Media and offering my services as a proof-reader for their doubtlessly expensive campaign. I'm sure they would have looked at me askance and guffawed, as I was but a lowly perfume jockey and they had paid a copy-writer good money to illustrate their general stupidity and sloppiness on 10 by 10 signage all over their stores. Fucking fuckwits.

On a less high blood pressure inducing note if someone a few posts ago was genuinely wondering why Glaswegians are given to using 'was' instead of 'were' in reference to a plural pronoun ('they was at the shops'), it may be due to Gaelic not differentiating using the verb. I'm not sure about Scots' Gaelic but in Irish, it is just the pronoun, unaccomapnied by verb change, that indicates if there was a single person or multiple persons enjoying themselves at the shop. 'Bhi me ar an siopa' (I was at the shop)/ Bhi siad ar an siopa (they was (literally) at the shop) - as you can see, 'bhi', past tense verb to be, doesn't change. On the other hand, in Manchester I often hear people saying 'It were'. I think that's just brilliant.

19:38 / 09.02.05

basically, there are fewer discete items and less of anything that isn't composed of such discrete objects. fewer teachers are at school during industrial action (if there were less teachers, i might be tempted to think it was due to an industrial accident!) while there is less sand on the beach after the storm... that kind of thing.

why don't you like 'fewer' stoatie? one of my habitual revisions in conversations!

no-one here has mentioned it that i've noticed. but i hate my computer trying to make me change 's' to 'z' in words like organise, etc.. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:34 / 09.02.05

I don't know, really... I use it and all, but it just seems clumsy... "more few", even as a concept, just feels uncomfortable.

13:55 / 15.04.05

Not a misspelling, exactly, but leaving the final period off an abbreviation or acronym:

U.S
p.s
e.g
U.S.S.R

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? Short attention span? Did you lose your style sheet somewhere between the letters i and e? The period is not there to keep two letters from touching each other, it is a fucking placeholder! Or don't use them at all, fine. Maybe everyone is just really into 'pataphysics, and I'm the dummy.

14:17 / 15.04.05

I didn't read this whole thread, but it's something I notice every so often - ON THIS VERY BOARD.

Okay, I don't like the words 'hir' and 'ze' anyway, but if you are going to use imaginary words, please try and use possessives where possessives should be. And pronouns where pronouns should be.

Do not write (sorry, Benny Ball, you are GUILTY, but not the first

"I like the cut of X's gib, and I think that hir has raised some interesting points"

This is double-wrong.

Whisky Priestess

22:13 / 15.04.05

Discrete for discreet.

Fuckwits!

This in a job description for a Press Officer (part of whose job will be to spot such blatant solecisms (NOT solipsisms

) -

"Diplomatic and discrete with good political judgement"

A mathematical set is discrete. A clandestine affair is discreet. You knobs.

17:02 / 14.10.05

This one seems to be popping up everywhere I go (online) lately -

The phrase you are looking for is wary of. Not weary of, weery of, and certainly not leery of. WARY. Like beware? See what that works?

17:50 / 14.10.05

"coinsedense"

Currently in the msn title of one of my friends. Nrr.

18:01 / 14.10.05

Amen, to being weary of "wary" errors.

I'm also definitely tired of correcting "definAtely." Eeps.

(Must admit I always have to look up discrete/discreet. I don't know why that one slips my brain so easily.)

Separate="there's a rat in separate." Just repeat that little rule: it always works, it is always right, unlike many more general language rules that are proven by a host of exceptions. (Oh, ACCEPT not except. "Just accept it.")

The Natural Way

18:24 / 14.10.05

definAtely

AaarghNNN!

The Natural Way

18:28 / 14.10.05

It just fucks me off that some people don't seem to understand the simple etymological (sp?) fact that words break down into constituent parts, consisting of other words - DeFINITEly, fr instance.

18:38 / 14.10.05

I can never remember discrete / discreet either, alas. I have taken your advice and made up a little mnemonic for myself though: Keep a secreet and bee discreet. Time will tell whether (not weather!) that will work.

Couple of times this week, I've seen disinterested when the writer meant uninterested. I am uninterested when boys prattle on about football. Judge Judy is disinterested when she decides who gets custody of the West Wing box sets.

17:51 / 22.09.07

Okay. There's so much that I want to respond to in the liberation vs. exploitation thread, but I don't have the energy at the moment and it's moving too fast and it seems too late and and...

So, because I don't feel up to responding to the actual content of the thread, I'm going to pick up on something I think is perhaps the most common spelling/grammar mistake on Barbelith. It doesn't exactly make me mad, but does always makes me flinch a little when I see it.

Lurid Archive says:

the variations within that system... are extremely significant to the people they effect (italics mine)

And diz says:

I don’t actually have any confidence in anyone’s ability to actually affect the sorts of changes being discussed

For those who don't see anything wrong there: affect and effect, each in their verb and noun forms.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

19:41 / 22.09.07

The second is technically kosher, depending on whether diz is talking about causing the changes to happen (effect), or altering the execution/results of said changes (affect).

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