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Grammatohooligans fined for defacing historic sign in a US national park (link).
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).] —Ceci n'est pas un seing. | ||
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check the League's website (link) to see their own punctuation error (no period). | ||
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Unbelievable. Deck is a Dartmouth graduate, too. | |||
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Why would they need a period? It's headlinese and not a sentence (the verb is missing). 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. | |||
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Do we know what the supposed errors were? 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 | |||
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Richard, I don't think we do exactly. Check out the comments in the Language Log link for quite a lot about this. 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. | |||
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| <Proofreader> |
I consider it a declaratory sentence of intentions, not a headline. | ||
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| Member |
Would that not be a rather good definition of a headline? Richard English | |||
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Deck:
Amon Shea:
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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. | |||
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Dennis Baron, linguo-bloggist at the Web of Language, has a new entry on word-raging vigilantism (link). —Ceci n'est pas un seing. | |||
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There's something strangely old-fashioned about the look of TEAL's Statement on the Signs of our National Parks and Public Lands (read: apology). 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, 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. | |||
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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.) —Ceci n'est pas un seing. | |||
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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. | |||
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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? | |||
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Valentine, 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. | |||
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I agree regarding that particular page. A recently viewed example (not the worst I've seen) is: http://www.rilin.state.ri.us/Lawrevision/plshort/pl2008nu.htm It takes a while to load, even with a broadband connection. Unless they've fixed it, it also demonstrates another common Word/FP error: a path to C:\\some.image. | |||
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higgledy piggledy Benjamin D. Herson, Shocked by the errors On signs in the parks, Appointed himself as a Grammatohooligan. He's now being punished for Making bad marks. | |||
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Nicely done, Jerry Myth Jellies Cerebroplegia--the cure is within our grasp | |||
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