Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Spelling and Grammar


Now that computers are doing a lot of editing, grammatical and spelling errors are creeping into books, newspapers and even public signs.


 You can’t but notice that ‘whom’ and ‘who’ are now being used interchangeably, while ‘momentarily’, after being hijacked by the Television people who’ve been using it incorrectly ever since, is almost unusable..


And it seems, in the name of economic use of words, nouns are being employed as verbs. There was this award ceremony were sportsmen were medaled (with medals?).


And have you noticed in books that where once upon a time it was ‘he lit his cigarette’ it's now ‘he lighted his cigarette’.


To think we used to correct our children when they’d say, ‘I bited my apple’. Were they already a step ahead of us?


But the other day, as we visited a shopping carpark, there was a public sign that must have been created by a computer.


Because the carpark is so crowded the powers that be have decided to place restrictions on how long you can park your car before having to pay a fee.


It bemuses me, that problems of scarcity are always countered by introducing a fee. Do fees actually create more parking spaces? What sort of equation was used, I wonder.


a. In the past there have not been enough parking spaces for people when this area was predominantly populated by single dwellings of 2 and a half people each

b. By introducing a fee

c. There will be enough parking spots for the increased population generated by many of those single dwellings having been turned into multi storey buildings housing hundreds of people.

I don’t get it. But, as the television advertisement says, ‘That’s why (they) are there, and I’m down here’.

In any case, I digress. About this sign. I would have hardly noticed it, but some outraged grammarian saw the error, and couldn’t help but point it out.
What the sign says
Maximum three hour customer parking
Fee’s apply for Terms and Condition Breaches
And the correction - There is no apostrophe in ‘fees’


Also the type of buildings which are now supplanting single dwellings of two and a half people, but presumably will not affect the parking scarcity if car owners have to pay a fee.


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