Single ladieeeeeeees!

I wish I could dance as well as her.

Copy: 1, Map: 0

149 stores in three states? Map seems to suggest more than three. I know they're liquidating, but update that shit!

Even while I had mono

... I was still stalking bad signs:


Hobby Lobby, Denver

Oh, the inconsistency

Once again, illogical placement of a random apostrophe-s here and there, but not everywhere. Why? WHYYYY?

Is this part of the city's budget cuts?

Letter reductions benefit no one.

The font that will give us all cancer

A scary sight on Halloween from Dan P.

And we OUR back!

Thanks to Dan P.

Nobody does WHAT?

(As pointed out by Brooklyn correspondent Benjamin B.)

NO, not literally

You don't have to be an obsessed grammar nerd to know that the word 'literally' is taking up residence in just about every conversation where someone wants to emphasize a point.

For instance, I just read a CNN article containing this quote:

"They don't want to debate the issues with us," he said Thursday in Louisville, Kentucky. "They don't want to debate the issues ... because they know they really literally don't have a political leg to stand on."

Um, no, not literally. Sorry. And no, you did not wait for the subway literally for, like, ever — and you did not literally die of embarrassment.

And if you had, I would miss you.

Good work, America

Not a lot of horrors to post lately. Instead, here is a really cool banner at that's at the top of the NYT Web page today. Loving it.

And remember ... Steve Jobs: Not Dead Yet!

Macho macho menu

Thanks to A.

Your Sew Vein turns 1!

On Aug. 20, 2007, the nerdvolution began.

So, today's walk to work afforded me this:


And I'm all, "WTF is that sign?" And then I'm all, "Oh, it's a massage place." And then I see a sign on the door next to it:

Oh, New York City.

Spelling relativism: 'Wrong' or merely 'variant'?

Making an Arguement for Misspelling

By Laura Fitzpatrick
TIME Magazine

Most teachers expect to correct their students' spelling mistakes once in a while. But Ken Smith has had enough. The senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, sees so many misspellings in papers submitted by first-year students that he says we'd be better off letting the perpetrators off the hook and doing away with certain spelling rules altogether.

Good spellers, Smith says, should be able to go on writing as usual; but those who find the current rules of English too hard to learn should have their spelling labeled not wrong, but variant. Smith zeroes in on 10 candidates for variant spellings, culled from his students' most commonly misspelled (or mispelled, as Smith suggests) words. Among them are Febuary, instead of February, twelth instead of twelfth, and truely instead of truly — all words, he says, that involve confusion over silent letters. When students would ask him why there's no e in truly, Smith didn't really have an answer: "I'd say, 'Well, I don't know ... You've just got to drop it because people do.'" Smith adds that when teachers correct spelling, they waste valuable time they could be spending on bigger ideas.

Word nerds aren't the only ones with a stake in the proposal. People who have trouble with spelling are punished when it comes to applying for jobs or even filling out forms, even though their mistakes are far from unusual, says Jack Bovill, chairman of the British-based Spelling Society, an international organization that has advocated simplified spellings since 1908. A 2007 Spelling Society survey of 1,000 British adults found that more than half could not spell embarrassed or millennium correctly and more than a quarter struggled with definitely, accidentally and separate.

Smith and Bovill are part of a long and illustrious line of spelling malcontents. Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt and even Noah Webster, the father of American lexicography, all lobbied for spelling reform, their reasons ranging from traumatic boyhood spelling experiences to the hope that easier communication could promote peace. In 1906, Mark Twain lobbied the Associated Press to use phonetic spelling. "The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet," he once wrote. "It doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught."

Non-English-speaking countries have been simplifying their spelling for centuries: Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Norway, Ireland, Indonesia and Japan, among others, have all instituted such reforms, with Portugal in May amending its spelling to follow the simpler Brazilian rules. Since 1755, when the English language was standardized in Samuel Johnson's aptly named Dictionary of the English Language, many variant spellings have become widely accepted on both sides of the pond. In 1864, for instance, the U.S. government officially changed the spelling of words like centre and timbre to end in the variant -er,, and more recently, at the beginning of the twentieth century, fantasy became an accepted variant of phantasy.

But some language purists insist that there is value to top-down rules of English. "People who spell a lot of words incorrectly either aren't paying attention or don't care," says Barbara Wallraff, who writes the "Wordcourt" column on language and writing problems for the Atlantic and King Features Syndicate. "Why are we changing our language to accommodate — with two 'm's — them?"

Joe Pickett, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, says that changes to dictionary entries are always on the table, but he and his seven fellow editors are a tough crowd. They keep an eye on print publications to see whether a variant usage has started to become mainstream. Any word that seems to be a good candidate for an update undergoes rigorous scrutiny as the editors seek input from a panel of some 200 orthographic and lexicographic whizzes. Even among this writerly crowd, 13% admitted in 1996 to combining a lot into a single word. But 93% still considered it an error and corrected it in their own writing — leading the editors not to change the entry. Variants are added to the dictionary, Pickett says, "only when we're really convinced that even people like us don't notice [the misspelling] much."

Smith, for his part, insists that he is advocating only for minor changes. "I'm not saying to people who have actually gone to all the trouble to learn all the exceptions to the rule that they should unlearn it. I'm just saying, let's have a few more variant spellings," he says. And if that doesn't catch on, he has another idea: "In the twenty-first century, why learn by heart rote spelling when you can just type it into a computer and spell-check?"

(All emphasis mine.)

Why do I continue to read CNN.com?

From their top stories list:
The actual hed:


Freudian e-slip? Nice job, CNN. Once again.

A note about family names

Now that every married couple I know has a blog, the following seems timely.

When you're writing a surname, the same rules apply as they do to every apostrophe-s word out there. It's the Johnsons, not the Johnson's. If we're talking about the Johnsons' lawnmower, however, it looks like that — plural possessive. (I live in New York City, so I don't see a lot this on homes or mailboxes, but nationwide, I've seen a lot of "Welcome to the Hanson's" action going on.)

Last names that end in -s are understandably tricky and take an -es. The Joneses always seems to mess everybody up. It's either The Jones Family or The Joneses.

However, I admit there may be more than one school of thought on this topic. If yours differs from mine, please fire away!

Healthy stools?

Once again, I must thank all the midtown Duane Reade locations for providing so much good YSV material.

Menus: On the whole, just way too easy

Ready, set ... spot the errors/hilarity! This is part of a giant menu with many, many mix-ups. Thanks again to Alex.

Wish you were her

Thankfully for these sign makers, a spelling bee isn't part of the Olympic Games.

Thanks, Paulsens, for the photo!!

Katie Holmes, please do not eat your staff

From Gawker Stalker today:


Ye olde apostrophe, it is your friend. Sometimes. When it feels like it.

Offensive things about this post No. 2 and 3: Lack of comma after girl; comma splice. I could go on, natch.

Two things

One: I made this at work today. Can anyone tell me what it is/they are?


Two: I would like to meet the parent who decided that "SIZE DOES MATTER!" was a good slogan for a sign tacked up on the side of an elementary school as part of a campaign to decrease class size. Consider your audience, people. Yeesh.

Name-Dropping: Jay-Z? Shawn Carter? Mr. Z?

By Chris Faraone
Columbia Journalism Review

The New York Times rarely refers to rock stars such as Alice Cooper, Moby, and Elton John by their birth names. With few exceptions, Vincent Furnier, Richard Melville Hall, and Reginald Dwight get free passes on their alter egos, as do the likes of American Idol icon Clay Aiken (Clayton Grissom) and anti-Christ superstar Marilyn Manson (Brian Warner). For some reason, though, the unofficial guideline that once compelled former Times critic Donal Henahan to make subsequent reference to Iggy Pop and Sid Vicious as Mr. Pop and Mr. Vicious (instead of Mr. [James] Osterberg and Mr. [Simon John] Beverly, or even Pop and Vicious) does not apply, apparently, to hip-hop artists. At the Times, the penalty for being a rapper is twofold: you are routinely called out on your birth name (no matter how nerdy and ironic it might be), and you rarely are addressed as “Mr.” This nominal double standard surfaces from time to time in hip-hop articles throughout the mainstream press, but due to the Times’s extensive urban-music coverage and its eternal struggle with honorific conformity, rap handles seem to inspire more copy dilemmas there.

Despite having sold several million discs and served as president of Def Jam Recordings under his alias, Jay-Z still gets pegged as Shawn Carter. The Times’s David M. Halbfinger and Jeff Leeds did so in reporting on the Brooklyn rap entrepreneur’s 2007 comeback, as did Los Angeles Times staff writer Richard Cromelin and the Boston Globe’s Sarah Rodman. No hip-hop artist is immune—Wu-Tang Clan ringleader RZA (Robert Diggs), Queens heavyweight 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson), and urban mogul Diddy (Sean Combs) are all routinely birth-named in the mainstream press.

Sam Sifton, the Times’s culture editor, says that while such decisions are handled on a case-by-case basis, rap artists often get special treatment. “There’s a big difference between [Houston rapper] Bun B and Tony Bennett,” Sifton says, referring to Bernard Freeman and Anthony Dominick Benedetto, respectively. “Tony Bennett took a stage name, which I think is a little different from taking an alias. Someone like Jay-Z can be Mr. Carter, certainly, or he can just be Jay-Z, but he’s never going to be Mr. Z.”

But is there a meaningful distinction between a “stage name” and an “alias”? That Sifton made an example of Jay-Z—rather than someone like, say, Ghostface Killah, whose chosen moniker is further outside the mainstream nomenclature—suggests that at the Times, at least, there is, and that rappers are in a class by themselves. Why else would Alicia Keys, a performer from beyond the rap realm—who took a stage name (or devised an alias) based on the instrument she plays—have never been outed as Alicia Augello-Cook? In Kelefa Sanneh’s October 5, 2003, Times CD roundup, Outkast rappers André 3000 (André Benjamin) and Big Boi (Antwan Patton) got name-dropped, while Erykah Badu’s birth name (Erica Wright) was never mentioned.

Even more confusing are articles that seem to follow no logic whatsoever: a December 3, 2006, Times profile on celebrity Sirius Radio hosts refers to rap personality Ludacris as Christopher Bridges (and as “Mr. Bridges” in subsequent references), but allows Eminem (Marshall Mathers), Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus), and Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) to use their stage names. On second reference, though, Bob Dylan is “Mr. Dylan,” while Eminem remains Eminem; Snoop is only mentioned once, but judging by former Times treatments he would have been called “Snoop” or “Snoop Dogg” had his name come up again.

“If you look in our archives, which we famously refer to as our compendium of past errors, you’ll see plenty of examples of us looking ridiculous,” Sifton says. “One of the difficulties that the Times has in addressing contemporary culture, and certainly hip-hop culture, is that we risk looking stupid all the time.”

Since it doesn’t look like it will be abandoning honorifics any time soon, blanket uniformity might be the best bet for the Times to look less foolish, or at least more consistent. After all, if they can call Brian Warner “Mr. Manson,” then surely America’s finest newsrooms can honor Calvin Broadus as Mr. Dogg.

(Original link here. Thanks, Mr. A-Head, for the tipoff!)

Girls in fishnets, please form a line to the left

I've seen this around before, but I'm posting it because my friend sent it to me!

Thanks to D.D.

At least it's cheap

And wait ... is this Comic Sans?

East side, Saturday night.

Counterintuitive Dept.

I do believe I have never seen the likes of this before:

Thanks to Dan P. in our Fort Worth offices.

Save money. Don't edit. Wal-Mart.

Not good, Sammy W. Not good.

Wal-Mart in Mason City, Iowa.

Laryngitis in the workplace ...

This is what I had to do today to remind myself not to answer, after I picked up (to what was luckily a junk-call recording) and said what came out sounding like, "Gwarddd murk, Dneeaarr."


I have stuff to do that does not involve the phone, so I came in to the office, but I have no voice. But I do have a computer! and texting! and IM! and two blogs!

There's no shutting me up, really.

Wait, what?

How can you log on to an e-mail address?

Murray Hill Post Office, 34th Street

Except after C

That's two strikes, hair ladies!

Third Avenue, Manhattan, Sunday.

"Rules" are made to be broken

Also in quotes: "Do Not Use Quantity Key"

D'Agostino, Third Avenue

"1000s of DVDs for sale" vs. "1000's of DVD's for sale"

I've been thinking about this predicament lately — namely, what do you do when it looks awkward to put an apostrophe and awkward not to? Which awkward is least awkward?

For example:
I've come to not really mind people writing, "CD's and DVD's for sale," and the like (that's how the NYT does it). However, AP Style is to say someone is in their 20s, and temperatures are also sans apostrophe. Maybe just words, not numbers, need the apostrophe for clarity.

Anyone else have different thoughts?

Thanks to Kimberly from Oregon for the photo!

Gimme gimme "more"

I have all kinds of problems with this ad. To begin with, everyone knows chicken strips is two words. I mean, right?


But the funnier bit is what's circled. Quotes around "numbers" — don't look "directly" at them!! Three words: Spell it out. When numbers touch numbers and it looks awkward, you always spell it out!

And finally, what's a Swee Treat? Or is it Sweet Reat? Either way, I'm a bit concerned.

Thanks to K, who has apparently become an operative for YSV against his better judgment.

It just don't make no sense

Quick! Someone zap the little grammar bug in this software!


Thanks to Super R for the sighting.

Oh, to be "young" again

Good news for those intent on sneaking in! Every minor with a fake ID is "18."

I'm sure the folks over at The "Blog" will appreciate this. Hi, guys! Love ya mean it!

Saint Marks, Manhattan

I Like Big Letters And I Can Not Lie

Too many caps it's a nightmare ...


Offending words: Personal, Times, Bar, Restaurant, Movie, Theatre, Back, Laptop.

Bottom reads, "Safety is everyone responsibility."

Taken Saturday night in the bathroom at Sin Sin, East Village, Manhattan.

Your sign is funny and must be posted

Third Avenue, Manhattan

(Although I am slightly bothered by the use of 'everyday' as a noun, I'll let it slide. Or not.)

Golden wrongness

I've seen a rash of The Font That Shall Not Be Named lately ...

Denver International Airport.

Maybe they got new placemats?

Or maybe the new management IS the renovation. So many possibilities ... I'm just happy they didn't use a hyphen with 'newly.' Always so tempting.

Murray Hill, NYC, Sunday.

License to err

And I never thought I'd see require and inquire mixed up. Alas.

42nd Street, Manhattan

Let's play spot the errors!

Ready ... go!
Fifth Avenue and low 30's, Manhattan. Their slices (or slice's) are muy excellent!

Grammar brings families together

I do not know who on earth ... thinks it's called the twenty-thirth.

And what do we think about Secretaries' versus Secretary's? It looks weird as a plural possessive. I'd leave it. Any other thoughts?

Thanks for the photo, Dad!

You can still get this without a photo

Alex says:

"My friend's next door neighbor had a sign on the door that said, 'Please see you're super to renew your lease.' Apparently they need to raise their self esteem in order to stay."

That is good.

I love a great wordplay.


(Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times)

Thanks, but I prefer coughie

And who doesn't love a good burger after a wonderful meal of caffeine and twist donuts?

Church Street, Soho.

The "information" age

PATH station, Saturday night

Monday Mistake Madness

Putting up a bunch today to compensate for the lack of posts last week. Sorry, guys — sometimes there just aren't enough errors to go around.

Oh, stop it.

Yahoo! skipped school on its/it's day.

Hard to know what they were going FOUR here.

These come from Alex in our our CT (soon to be Queens) bureau. Thanks, A!

Understaffed campaigns

Can't he hire a copy editor?

Thanks to K. for the find.

Hey, at least you don't have to pay for 'em

Thanks to R. from our upstate New York offices.

Hmm ...

Can you say it like this?

Apparently I am failing to change the world. Huh. How 'bout that.

No matter how hard I try, this one is still painful because it's so rampant!


Canal Street at Broadway, Manhattan.

Flipped out

In the 40's at Third Avenue, Manhattan.

Someone was sick on the day we all learned "change the 'Y' to 'I' and add -es"

Good eye, Kimberly L. from Oregon!

To all the ladie's in the house!

Duane Reade has some issues. Remember this one?