Spot the error!

As seen on TV, last night.

Literally? Literally.

"People tune into me for escapism. When you went to the Glow in the Dark Tour, you were literally transported to another planet."

-Kanye West

Um, NO WE WEREN'T. But I bet he thinks we were.

Need. Decoder. For British. English.

"We should be perhaps planning on the basis that there is more freak weather about and we shouldn't just buckle to it."

-David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, on the recent flipping-out of London due to a laughably small amount of snow

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!

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.)

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!)

That is good.

I love a great wordplay.


(Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times)

I've found my personal hero

A dude named Jeff Deck is TRAVELING AROUND THE COUNTRY for three months correcting errors on signs. He carries around a Typo Correction kit that includes chalk, white-out and adhesive letters.

His blog is here. It is so deeply entertaining and hilarious. I can't stop reading it.

Details on his trip are here.

Thanks to correspondent B.W., who is getting a Ph.D., though not in grammar.

No splicing allowed

Dear People Who Edit Stuff,

PLEASE stop letting comma splices into print, it hurts. Ah HA! Did you notice that first sentence was a comma splice? If not, please continue.

I just read a bunch of pieces by a certain writer. Welcome to Comma Splice City! Why are the editors not aware of these things? This is not one of those "That's just a writing style" situations, of which there are many. This is incorrect, y'all.

A comma splice is when you have a comma where a period (or possibly a semicolon) should be. Examples:

"I'm hungry, let's go eat." (NO!)
"The document is confidential, you can't open it." (NO!!)
"There's something dead in there, it smells." (NO!!!)

If you see this happening, please contact your local authorities.

Celebrate good times, come on

It's NATIONAL GRAMMAR DAY!

Everybody put yo' hands up! Put yo' hands UP! Put yo' hands UP!

Dear Blogger: What the crap, dude?

I just noticed all my photos from previous posts are, like, not there anymore.

Did I reach my pic-posting limit or something? A blog of this nature sans photos is no blog at all.

Anybody else know what might be up?

So, here's what

I am now in possession of an iPhone, otherwise known as a photo-intensive blog's best friend.

Your Sew Vein 2.0, TK. Hold on to your butts, and tell your friends.

Paws/pause (Or: I'm wrong a lot.)

These two words are not easily confused, apparently, unless you're me.

So, I'm reading an NYT article a bit ago, which quotes a bit of the Christmas carol, "Up On The Housetop." And then I'm thinking, "SPOTTED! AN ERROR IN THE TIMES! BY ME!"

It said, "Up on the housetop / reindeer pause / down comes good ol' Santa Clause."

How could they confuse PAUSE and PAWS? What carrots. So I looked up the lyrics to confirm my catch, only to discover I was dead wrong. I know reindeers can PAUSE, but alas, I guess they don't have PAWS.

So are they hooves?

OMG, nothing to post

It's as if the grammatical world has stopped on a dime and has decided to stop bugging me. It must be the Christmas spirit!

Anyone else have news?

Things that bug me about the NYT

• The excessive use of prepositional phrases at the beginning of heds:

• Awkward 'Is Dead' construction in obit heds. It's just ... harsh:

• Really egregious errors in pieces about my favorite band after The Beatles that clearly were not fact-checked. I know concert reviews are on super-tight deadlines, but c'mon, people*:

*That was for Alex.

Good thing only one writer is striking

Well, according to this, anyway:


Nice work, VH1.

Now THAT is scary

During the Greenwich Village parade last night, I saw this on the side of a tour bus full of costumed people:


Try ROCKEFELLER. At least it's correct on their Web site, but I wonder how many of its buses bear this horrifying error. Probably many or all of them.

And then I rode the subway home with four drag queens in assless* pants. I love this city!

*Ass-less?