Rihanna: Grammatical whiz?

You know that song by Rihanna called "S.O.S. (Rescue Me)"? I was on the treadmill this morning when I realized that, to the trained (read: obsessive) ear, the lyrics could sound incorrect, due to our fancy language and its homonyms. Please, you look:

Apparently the lyric is:

Y-O-U are making this hard / you got me tossin ' and turnin' / can't sleep at night

But I heard it as:

Y-O-U-R making this hard / you got me ...

... which would be WRONG-O!

Luckily, all the lyrics sites appear to get it right (except for one, which appears to be run by Muppets). Crisis averted! But I suppose we'll never know for sure unless we check the CD liner notes. And who buys CDs anymore?

How well do you know your homonyms? Try this quiz.

Does this mean I can open it?

Normally I do not take photographs of mail that comes to our office, for fear of violating a section of some corporate "suspicious activity" clause, but the quotes were too funny to pass up.

Second violation? COMIC SANS. Or, as I like to refer to it, COMIC NO!

(Blurring mine.)

It's just so disgustingly awesome

Maybe you can't see all of this, but maybe that's OK, because your brain will hurt from all the superfluous quote-age. Better eat some edamame, cure that right on up!


Thanks to Alex H.

Ebonics in China

Thanks to K.

Screwing up punctuation, in a story about punctuation, when speaking of a book about punctuation

This New York Times story about a crusade for proper use of the semicolon begins with the dreaded 'correction appended.'

Please, you look:

Correction: February 19, 2008 An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

The irony — it's too much! Don't look directly at it!!

Huh?

I can't wait till the laundry room back on order. Refuse to pay for wash-and-fold!

Sex sells ... gyros?

Something tells me this is about more than food:

Nothing wrong here; I just saw this at a street fair over the summer and have never posted it.