The note is suspect of being fake but the misspelling of cubbard is a nice touch. The note is titled "When you're house sitting for millennials and ask how the lights work."
The link goes to twitter post that circulated but search those words and a lot of results appear.
The house sitter is answered with a long description involving downloading an app to one's presumed smartphone and synching the app with their home device that turns on/off the lights. Access to the device to synch is convoluted and involves opening a cupboard above coat hooks. Synch the device manually then go the bathroom and flick off the lights.
The story is about young people's preference for complicating edge technology over simple straightforward appliance. Comments latched onto misspelling cupboards.
I am a terrible editor. Everything looks good to me. I missed that one. Schwing, went right by. Yet most everyone else saw it. And it bugged them. It colored their view of the people writing the note. The error diminished the writers in the reader's view.
What a bummer.
I'm going to start saving the grammatical errors that British commenters point out. They concentrate on the error to the exclusion of all else. Without registering annoyance their nit-pics are the finest of all. They are really very good at pointing out mismatches within and between predicates. Spotting and naming them is their expertise. It signals an exceedingly haughty superiority in language without complaining. That's what I'll do, I'll start saving and sharing for entertainment.
I just now read, "I'm so glad you didn't end the sentence with "for" that's one of my pet peeves." The sentence was restructured to avoid it making it sound a bit funny in order to be proper. But it satisfied the reader.
I didn't have the heart to tell the intern trying so hard to impress to drop the word "Moms" for "mother." The street language really does not work at the Federal Reserve Bank. He needed to know that but I couldn't tell him. Their memos are voiceless. Even in a meeting that street language will hold him back, and learning their language is not a cultural or racial sellout, white kids had to learn the specific and limited corporate language too. It's not his culture not fitting, all cultures must learn to fit, and it's not white culture, it's foreign to whites too. It's a signaling thing.
Peeved, really? There's an emotional thing going on that prevents acceptance of different forms?
I get corrected in every language I try. If I were afraid of correction then I wouldn't try anything. There is always a palpable sincerity. Except when there's not. Except when there's only signaling.
Grammar is my worst subject. I can't match up anything right. That's where my scores are always the worstest.
12 comments:
I was thinking today the first time I was corrected for "sheeps"
You cannot believe my sense of betrayal.
I was sooooooooo distressed to learn of irregulars. I just sat there and though "Fuck me. Now I have to learn all ones that don't fit the rule. As if the rule isn't even a real rule!1!111111!!!!111111 "
I can still feel the indignation I felt waaaaay back then.
"Same thing with fish"
"Same thing with hair."
GODDAMNIT!
I knew right then that language was going to be impossible, that rules are arbitrary, that I might as well make up my own.
Give him what for.
Ends in 'for', yet is OK.
My pet peeve with British writers is when they deliberately anglicize American place names.
Sorry, the Japanese did not attack "Pearl Harbour".
I just saw this movie today and there is a scene in it that someone was wooed enough, like me, to clip it up on YouTube.
"Good job"... I think I'll post it up on it's own.
Chip, you're an English genius compared to me. I don't know if I have ever posted a comment in proper English. I mean, I really don't know. Couldn't tell you if this one is correct or not. I'm just hoping that people think my mistakes are me being clever and non-conformist. Yea, that's what I'm doin'.
Now that I've been thinking about his all day and put myself back there I see now what a little shitass I was. I was very cross, lastingly cross from the sheeps and mice plural irregulars to next tremendous betrayal of silent letters in spelling. Two years between these language betrayals. Silent letters in language betray phonetic spelling. Here's your way, here's your rule, fuck these ways and these rules. WTF? English his very strange.
I was so lastingly cross about people screwing up the language before I got here. It is the worst thing you dumb fucks could have done. I thought then. And then expect me to follow all your petty inconsistencies as hard and fast rules. I could believe your insouciance in just snapping the rug from under me like this. Further proof that adults are irrational.
I'm re-living the anger. Re-feeling it. I was an unhappy rotten little shitass because of this. You (they, everybody) fucked up the language before I got here. That was my problem. And, Doctor, I suppose I never recovered.
It's a signaling thing.
Yes. There it is, the heart of the matter.
Regardless of the length of post, or structure or grammatical presentation within it, when the The Heart of the Matter shows up somewhere in a Chip Ahoy post/comment, the Aha! or Bam! of recognition that follows upon finding it renders all else secondary.
Expecting others to follow petty inconsistencies as hard and fast rules is the name of the game, with those who do manage to do a credible job of attending to them receiving a bow on the lid of the box that defines them.
When those who don't follow that line or receive the bow, retain enough energy to spring out of a box from time to time, the results can be disarming. If not provoking, irritating, bemusing, affirming, or creatively inviting.
I agree with you for the most part, but not when it comes to professional communicators -- people who get paid to write or speak. Such people are artisans, and the English language is their box of tools. The better you know how to use your tools, the better your product will be, whether you are a chef, a carpenter or a writer.
You may say, "Well, you know what he meant." But every time I have to stop, go back and figure out what he meant, the communication suffers.
Hrrumph. /curmudgeon off/
If they pulled that shit on me I would just unscrew the light bulbs. I would undo the whole fixture if I had to. Don't route your life through a device...
Well, I guess I can't make that decision for you. But you better let me know, or else I'm disassembling your domicile if I need to care for it.
Friggin sheepses. Shepses. Sepsis.
I'm great at grammar and, since copying most of Derrida into notebooks in the 80s so as to reduce my reading speed, great at spelling. I'm terrible at proofreading in the same space that the typing was done. The typos are instantly obvious when I hit publish and the shape of the space changes.
Connell McShane, the quasi-cohost of Imus in the Morning, sometimes says "could have went," but is otherwise perfect. An unfixed childhood dialect mistake.
Newscasters very often put "whom" with "police say." The suspect whom police say stabbed the woman has not been found. The previous cohost Charles McCord always did that one.
Eternity is the beginning of a school vacation from school.
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