Posted on 06/20/2012 6:30:54 AM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.
"I cringe every time I hear" people misuse "is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says.
Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications errors, many managers say.
[...]
Mr. Garner, the usage expert, requires all job applicants at his nine-employee firm—including people who just want to pack boxes—to pass spelling and grammar tests before he will hire them. And he requires employees to have at least two other people copy-edit and make corrections to every important email and letter that goes out.
"Twenty-five years ago it was impossible to put your hands on something that hadn't been professionally copy-edited," Mr. Garner says. "Today, it is actually hard to put your hands on something that has been professionally copy-edited."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
“Irregardless” and “I could care less” drive me slightly insane.
I know, right?
That is driving me CRAZY, especially when it’s literally the first thing out of somebody’s mouth. “Our next guest is Joe Intellectual of the Blunge Institute. Joe, how does the vote in Mumbostan affect the Presidential race?” “Well, I mean...”
I am stunned by the widespread usage of this verbal tic, which seems to me to have become ubiquitous virtually overnight, across all classes, vocations, and even countries and races. One of Whitney Houston’s songwriters, grasping for words, stammered four “I mean”s in a row, sounding like somebody trying to start a car on a cold morning. Apparently it had such an effect that Piers Morgan started doing it in the same interview.
That will get them a "college boy, eh?" butt-kicking these days. Now it's "So she was like, ..., and I was like, yeah, exactly..."
Commentators who use less and fewer interchangeably elicit my disdain. “Less voters turned out for the election”, is cause to wonder if the voters were cut off at the knees or the waist.
I can always tell when Hillary C.is about to unleash a whopper when she starts a sentence with, “Well, you know...”.
Good article.
As someone who does freelance copyediting work on the side, I sees terribel grammer and speling all the time.
Exactly! *SMIRK*
How very postmodern of you. True dat.
My pet peeve is people using your when it should be the contraction you’re. I see you went to a school that taught the difference.
Here, here!
“Mr. Garner... requires all job applicants—including people who just want to pack boxes—to pass spelling and grammar tests before he will hire them.”
Someone incapable of mastering spelling and grammar might nevertheless be an asset to the shipping department.
What a bad manager. (No verb; it’s implied and grammatically acceptable for emphasis.)
How about “CAN I help you?” (Hell, I don’t know if you can) vs. “MAY I help you?”.
Or, when I call my buddy’s office, his [minority hire] secretary responds with “May I axe who’s calling?”. The first time she said it I responded “No, you may not, but I’ll tell you my name”.
And, of course, an issue may have one criterION, or many criterIA.
I could go on for hours.
Ah! Enallage! The rhetorical device in which deliberate grammatical mistakes are made for emphasis. One of the saddest things about grammatical illiteracy is that it robs those afflicted of the ability to effectively deploy enallage.
“How are you doing?”
Fair to midland?.
It’s not postmodern, it’s understanding reality. Language evolves, language has always evolved, language WILL always evolve. Just because somebody wrote a prescriptive people think that’s forever. It isn’t. Language is still going to evolve, maybe a little slower because now there’s a book teachers can point to, but it still will happen. People change, societies change, languages change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but change is inevitable. And complaining about it just says you’re stuck in the past, that you have failed to keep up.
No, just this once I think we’ll let the slobs and incompetents suck it up. If this injures discostu’s precious self-esteem...well, that sounds like a personal problem to me. I am tired of the way they’ve trashed a world of logic, order, elegance, and beauty.
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