Submersed/Immerged In My Studies

I need to post something in here, and I've been wrestling with words a lot, so I think I'll double-back to that tack, if no one minds.

By which I mean, I'm nearing one full year as a hired employee of a local health and medical marketing agency, for which I fulfill the capacity of QA specialist, proofreader and copy editor. I could not be more pleased: on top of friendly and interesting staff, more than a spacious creative office, and beyond the stunning view of St. Anthony Falls and the Stone Arch Bridge—I am a valued member of a dynamic and cohesive team, and my function is to clear up the language we speak. I could not be more pleased.

Essential reading for this work are John McWhorter's The Power of Babel and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, by which the nascent editor will learn to take some power away from grammarians and lend it to linguists. No longer do you defend the idiosyncrasies of the American English dialect as "that's just how it is" (per those horrible Victorians, who just pulled stuff out of their butts and declared it Scripture); you can step up and say "this is where it came from and why we still use it". Isn't that exciting?

Spelling Beer Names Is Tricky

I try to let local businesses off the hook. They're working hard, they're doing good work (patronizing local businesses keeps two thirds of the money you spend within the community, as opposed to funneling it off elsewhere), and they've got a lot on their mind.

Taken at the Herkimer, Mpls., MN

I don't let major corporations off the hook. When they make errors, I take no little delight in highlighting these and parading them before a public audience, whether here on my sad little blog or on my favorite message board (which shall go unnamed). I feel that they should be better than a struggling mom-and-pop, in terms of professionalism. It would fill me with dread to think that a juggernaut of ineptitude and "that's good enough, I guess" could emerge to stake a national claim and go after the checkbooks of hard-working, decent citizens such as you and me.

Is that a double-standard? I don't think so.

At the same time, this was quite a slip-up. I like the Herkimer because they make great beer right there on the premises. I like them even more now that I myself am into homebrewing. I would love to sit in and watch while their guy goes about his business, checking the vats, mixing the grains (though I suspect much of it is automated). Yet someone wrote out that chalkboard sign by hand, someone had to have sounded out the letters while they wrote it, and someone had to have stepped back to admire their handiwork. Not to mention, other workers must have looked at this sign, as well as countless customers from all walks of life. Hipsters tend to settle in at our local bars like a plague of tasteless, undereducated locusts, but the Herkimer enjoys a broad spectrum of clientele, I think.

Someone should have noticed this by now, is what I'm saying.

Piratical Typography

The Science Museum of Minnesota, which is awesome, is hosting a historical exhibit of what pirates were really like, as seen in the above bus shelter display. But if you're like me, what you notice almost immediately is the glaring typo. How did "takover" make it past all the levels of design, editing, proofing and print? It's not even a goof in the fine print: it's large, bold, and in decorative typeface.

I work in a marketing agency, and people in such agencies seem to know what each other are up to. I asked around to find out who was in charge of this campaign and someone thought, maybe, that this work might've been in-house. Trying to confirm that, though.

Stuff like this drives me absolutely crazy, having been an unemployed copy editor for eight of the past twelve months.

UPDATE: At least they're in good company.

• M8: Hostile Takover (video game forum)
• Kraft Lauches Hostile Takover Bid of Cadbury Chocolate (LA Weekly blog)
• Hostile Takover gift image (stock image forum)
• The Kochs and the Cato Institute: a hostile takover? (The Guardian)

There's More Work at the Post Office

Hmm. Out of all the organizations that could misspell "receive," I'd rather the United States Postal Service weren't one of them.

I was notified one of my change-of-address orders was about to expire. It was from an address where I was having my mail sent while I was overseas, to an address my wife and I stayed at temporarily until we could find a more permanent place to stay. Obviously I didn't need that forwarding anymore, but this typo on the confirmation screen caught my eye.

Ocean ≠ Tomato Sauce, Eh?

Seriously? Right off the bat?

Hell of a way to start an auspicious infographic: the National Post covered James Cameron's voyage to the bottom of the sea in the "Deepsea Challenger." Please note the first paragraph in the infographic, in which the brave crew plumbs the "Marinara" Trench.

Unfortunately, a quick Google search indicates this is not the first time the "deepest, most brutal part of the ocean" (Dethklok) has been confused with an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet.

Oh, an' That's a Bad Miss

This is some of the big news circulating today: Amy Winehouse's addiction has finally caught up with her. The police call it an "unexplained" death, but they have to, don't they. I think there are no mysteries behind this.

The unexplained mystery here is how the "Editor-at-Large" of Mashable, Ben Parr, got tangled over his use of "alluded/eluded." This is a screenshot of Parr's post on Google+.

You can be sure other people following him called this out. And sure, it's a common enough mistake, but it's exceptional when it comes from the hands of one whose trade is wordsmithing. One advantage of Google+ is that you can edit your posts after they go up--unlike with Facebook--but it's been over six hours and Parr hasn't touched this. Ouch.

The NYT Doesn't Realize They Should Be Hiring

I know, I know. Big-city paper gets all hurried and flustered, rushing out to make the scoop or whatever. Trusted journalist hacks out a quick tidbit about recent events, knocks it out in a few minutes, prints it out and rushes it off to print in the paper.

No one looks it over. No editor, no proofer involved in the process. Certainly, any spell-checker would not have caught this error in all likelihood.

Yet it stood out to me. I glossed over the article, idly perusing the New York Times while sitting at the table in my sister-in-law's house, and suddenly the running gait of my eyes tripped over a large obstacle. That's what spelling (even contextual spelling) errors do to me, usually. They stop me, they take me out of the reading process and a section of my brain lights up. It's the same section that believes in justice, I think, and maybe even seats the sense of a universal intelligence guiding us along, beyond the ken of mortal understanding. Because I believe in and work with these things, discrepancies and exceptions snag my attention as my conscious thought races past.

I dug out my Wacom tablet, selected an appropriately red color for my "ink," took electric pen in hand, and marked this up in nothing more or less ignominious than a recent version of MS Paint. Now that I know how to do that, and provided I always keep my camera on me, no homemade signage will be safe from my scrutiny.

Capitalization is the Least of Their Worries

Well, at the risk of coming off as "pedantic," I have to point this out, and I confess I'm gratified to do so.

This is a menu from TiGER SUSHi--the odd capitalization being their brand--in Minneapolis. Technically, this is TiGER SUSHi II, as the first restaurant opened in the Mall of America. We went to the Uptown location, and as Uptown is foggy with hipsters, the status of being almost as good as the Mall of America should hint at the calibre of Twin Cities hipsters.

Please to note: the desultory and patternless capitalization of various nouns, adjectives, and adverbs throughout the body copy. This could've been a strange and tedious cut-n-paste job from other texts, or maybe their writer just wanted to emphasize certain points. It's also possible the font they used lacked lowercase form for certain letters... no, that's not possible. That's clearly not true: it's just awful typing.

Abuse of Quotation Marks

Thai Basil "Tossed" Noodles suggests that not only aren't they genuinely tossed, but some other verb has been done to them that the staff euphemizes as "tossing." I have no idea what they're implying with their "stir-fry" style--imitating the facsimile of something resembling something else?

Alakan Salmon

Should be Alaskan Salmon, obviously. Or maybe "A Lacking Salmon," an honest confession of sub-par fish?

Chillaen Sea Bass

Wow, not only did someone not know how to spell "Chilean," but they had neither doubt nor curiosity as to whether they had gotten it correct.