I thought my Eglish was bad...

[caleb72]

I'm in I.T. and I'm so used crap like this both in responses to RFTs and in general documentation. However, what I find really annoying are log file messages with typos. Once you've programmed a typo into a log message it's repeated over and over again for the life of the product. Drives me bonkers.

Having said that though, there are some language idiosyncrasies that I find cute. I work with many Indians (yep I.T.) and there are a couple of expressions that are used that make me smile. My favourite would be "do the needful" and I like the insistence of reminders being "gentle". I wouldn't necessarily change these Indianisms though as they have a real charm to them.

[crich70]

There was an actual news story posted about at another message board I'm a member of not long ago and the writer of the article had made some big blunders.

Spoiler:

An older woman was to go on (trail) for trying to cut her husband's (gentiles) off. Just goes to show that people rely too much on spell checkers.

The words were spelled right but they were the wrong words.

[Steven Lake]

I do that every so often as well. But stuff like that usually only survives the rough draft. It rarely makes it out of later edits. BTW, I love the word choices for that sentence. It made me laugh.

[bigjantailor]

I might be throwing stones in a glass house as I'm dyslexic and can make any gammar nazi cry but here's a good one:



Years ago there was a protest about affordable housing in the downtown east side of Vancouver with many people camping out to make their point. The banner they sat under said: The poor are revolting. Yes, we need to fix Canadain education too.

Have fun, Jan Tailor

[crich70]

Originally Posted by bigjantailor

I might be throwing stones in a glass house as I'm dyslexic and can make any gammar nazi cry but here's a good one:



Years ago there was a protest about affordable housing in the downtown east side of Vancouver with many people camping out to make their point. The banner they sat under said: The poor are revolting. Yes, we need to fix Canadain education too.

Have fun, Jan Tailor

Ah, but you have a legitimate excuse for spelling errors as you are dyslexic. Those who aren't and make such errors because they are in so much of a hurry that they can't take the time to do a scan of their text above and beyond spell check don't have that excuse. While no one is perfect the vast majority of such errors could be prevented if a little more care was taken (IMO).

[Lloyd Tackitt]

It reads as though it was translated into english from chinese. Perhaps it was outsourced.

[HarryT]

I worked for many years in the UK's nuclear power industry, and we used to regularly get protesters outside our site. One particular protest group, who used to turn up on quite a regular basis, always amused me because they had a large sign that said on it "WIMMIN AGAINST NUKES" .

[LuvReadin]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

The best part was, she refused to have her book edited claiming "I'm a PHD. I don't make mistakes!" lol.

Oh, that sounds sooo familiar. And yet the professors (in the UK sense of major big-shot senior academic) with years of experience will happily submit to their copy being edited and even thank the copyed for improving their work!

Originally Posted by mXb

.
Also I have noticed that the cheaper eBooks appear to have been proof read by people whose first language is not english, and learnt the language by listening rather than writing it.

e.g. "given" instead of "giving"........"wages" instead of "wagers" (that was on 2 consecutive lines so not a typo)

And 'waived' for 'waved', 'principle' for 'principal' (and vice versa), and 'monkjack' for 'muntjac', to name but three in a recent book - shame, because the story was quite good.

[crich70]

Sometimes the improvements cause more problems than anything else too. I remember reading about how a lot of the errors in the LOTR came about. The publishers would change spelling on words because they assumed that Prof. Tolkien had misspelled the word. We're still paying for that blunder today I believe.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I worked for many years in the UK's nuclear power industry, and we used to regularly get protesters outside our site. One particular protest group, who used to turn up on quite a regular basis, always amused me because they had a large sign that said on it "WIMMIN AGAINST NUKES" .

That's intentional, though. Like womyn - they don't want to have any "men" in them.

Originally Posted by crich70

Sometimes the improvements cause more problems than anything else too. I remember reading about how a lot of the errors in the LOTR came about. The publishers would change spelling on words because they assumed that Prof. Tolkien had misspelled the word. We're still paying for that blunder today I believe.

Still, I'm sure the MS wasn't free of errors...and can you imagine having the job of proofreading LOTR?

Do you see any errors here?

[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by LuvReadin

Oh, that sounds sooo familiar. And yet the professors (in the UK sense of major big-shot senior academic) with years of experience will happily submit to their copy being edited and even thank the copyed for improving their work!

Well, there's a term for this that comes out of the early days of the tech industry. There was a computer certification at the time called "MCSE", or "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer". The tests were entirely multiple choice and no hands on, allowing people to cheat very, very easily on them using brain dumps and other cheating methods. The ease by which these tests could be passed by nearly anybody created a class of engineers we called "Paper MCSE's". They were people who'd passed the test, but didn't know jack squat about the systems they were working on. Those that knew the systems were called "Practical MCSE's".

The profs you mention sound a lot like the Practical MCSE's we had, whereas the lady I mentioned was the literary equivalent of a Paper MCSE.

[Freeshadow]

Minesweeper Consultant Solitaire Expert

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

That's intentional, though. Like womyn - they don't want to have any "men" in them.


Still, I'm sure the MS wasn't free of errors...and can you imagine having the job of proofreading LOTR?

Do you see any errors here?

Touche, but I meant things like dwarfs for dwarves and so forth rather than elvish script.

[Freeshadow]

I so much do not want to dig my tengwar, quenya and sindarin reference material out now
But nevertheless there are cases where misinformation may lead to unwanted corrections.
E.g. I the dwarven inscription on the map in the Hobbit (The one written in futhork) as well as its translation in the book, says: " stand by the grey stone hwen..." If one happens not to know that it's correct for archaic English - as I didn't - you end up thinking it's a mistake.

[CTurner]

Yeah, can you imagine trying to be the editor/proofreader for the Lord of the Rings? You'd have to be as canny as Tolkien himself...