Grammatohooligans fined for defacing historic sign in a US national park (link).
quote:
Jeff Michael Deck, 28, of Somerville, Mass., and Benjamin Douglas Herson, 28, of Virginia Beach, Va., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Flagstaff after damaging a rare, hand-painted sign in Grand Canyon National Park. They were sentenced to a year's probation, during which they cannot enter any national park, and were ordered to pay restitution.
According to court records, Deck and Herson toured the United States from March to May, wiping out errors on government and private signs. On March 28, while at Desert View Watchtower on the South Rim, they used a white-out product and a permanent marker to deface a sign painted more than 60 years ago by artist Mary Colter. The sign, a National Historic Landmark, was considered unique and irreplaceable, according to Sandy Raynor, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix.
The justice system does work. I, too, blame Lynne Truss for seducing these two men into becoming what they are today: grammarian criminals. [Via Language Log (link).]
And I agree with Arnie; headlines need no full stop. Remember the purpose of a headline; it exists to attract the attention of readers and to entice them into the body of the writing. The last thing you want readers to do when they read a headline, is stop!
Richard English
Posts: 8038 | Location: Partridge Green, West Sussex, UK
It looks like the misplaced apostrophe in womens'. About halfway through the text emense occurs, which is where the vandal lost heart and stopped defacing the sign (link and link).
Personally, I believe that Deck will be haunted by the absence of the several thousands of dollars more than he will be by the alternative spelling of this word, but maybe I’m wrong. In fact, I sincerely hope that I am wrong – I would love it if this self-righteous prig were haunted in his dreams, tonight and for many nights to come. Because I would like to point out to him that the sign he saw is hardly the only incidence of immense being written ‘emense’. It comes up in the OED - Caxton used it in Eneydos in 1490. And a quick perusal of Google Books shows that it was use in the Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and also in Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (by Joanna Baillie in 1821), and also in 476 other sources listed. If Mr. Deck has the courage of his convictions, and if his diary was telling the truth, it would be appropriate if he has ‘train-whistle-blighted dreams’ once for every one of those 478 emenses found in Google Books.
Oh, thanks for that, goofy. I just love Ammon Shea, and have been perusing his new book in the book store. I really should buy it because I am enjoying it so much. While knowing as much as he does about words and etymology, he's also very modest and loves making fun of himself.
To start with, they use double-spacing after a full stop (period). This was taught by typing tutors when typewriters used fixed-width fonts. It is undesirable now that word processing and variable width fonts are available.
Secondly, it is common practice nowadays to indicate a paragraph by a blank line, and start the new paragraph flush-left, not by indenting as they have done.
Also, as self-appointed typographical mavens I would have thought they would have frowned on the use of multiple explamation marks. Twice they say,
quote:
altering signs without the permission of the owner is a crime!!
I wonder if their statement was dictated or even written by their parents?
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Interesting observations, arnie. I looked at the source for the page, and it was written in Word 11 and saved as (X)HTML. All the paragraph tags would seem to have been unmodified Normal. (I stopped a Word 97, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the curious reader to try writing a simple document in Word and saving it to HTML to see what they get.)
The (X)HTML produced by Word is famously poor, and Word 11 seems little better. There's probably twice the markup needed to get the page to display as it was composed, and it would take even less to display it adequately in simple HTML. Heck, they might as well have written it in a text editor and saved it as a text file, for all the formatting it really needs.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Twice the mark-up? 10x is more like it. This particular page is unusual in its brevity. A typical Word/Front Page includes dozens of useless font definitions (including at least 3 Korean ones). I've seen some that include a font definition for a font used primarily in comic books in Taiwan. CSS repeated in every table cell?
Perhaps I was underestimating, but I was only referring to this particular page, which has virtually no need for markup as there's little formatting used.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
