I hate the expression “my bad” with a vengeance!
Where did it come from? A quick web search turned up a suggestion that it was coined by a basketball player about 20 years ago.
Recently this meme has become much more common via some unknown but virulent vector. I have heard a couple of people at work say it and now my son has started saying it a lot.
I react almost with convulsions when I hear it! It is so mistake!
I have found another really bad bit of punctuation. This is a heading from a full-page advertisement in a cycling magazine. It is for a cycling clothing company with a line of women’s jerseys that support breast cancer research (the giving back):
Are they questioning their own commitment to breast cancer research?
I can’t fathom why the magazine editor allowed this egregiously sloppy copy into the magazine. It makes the advertiser look stupid and doesn’t reflect well on the magazine either.
We are suffering a prolonged drought in much of eastern Australia and Brisbane is subject to long-term water restrictions. Our state premier recently announced that Queensland would start mixing treated waste water into the supply. There was going to be a plebiscite but he wisely decided to not ask for public opinion on what easily becomes an unnecessarily emotional issue.
The radio news announcer told us that by the end of next year, Brisbane residents would be drinking recycled sewerage! (Of course she meant recycled sewage.)
Perhaps the extra r’s could be put back into secretary or February.
Phew! I did goodest at the Are You Gooder at Grammar? quiz:
Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know “no” from “know.” Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).
OK, so it’s really about punctuation, but it is fun.
Bill Walsh found this funny item about some advertising that had a hyphen, but not enough.
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The hyphen is unfortunately fading from common use. The current fashion for compound adjectives exaggerates the problem. So there are many food products labelled as 97% fat free instead of 97% fat-free.
We recently received a brochure from a wine merchant that loudly proclaims on its cover:
Must have
wines
for your
collection
Obviously they mean must-have wines, otherwise it is no more than a truism (you must have wines or you don’t have a collection).
So what? We know what they mean. Yes, but without hyphens we often need to read twice to be sure. Properly used, hyphens make reading easier. Otherwise there is ambiguity in meaning and reading is slower.
What are the rules we are apparently not learning in school? Melanie Spiller’s Hyphen Hysteria is a good guide. Wikipedia also provides more detail.
In popular speech, especially of younger people (pick your generational moniker), I have heard for many years forms of the verb go. Examples are:
“I went, ‘You are crazy!’ and he went, ‘I am not!’”
During the past few years it is amazingly common to hear forms of the combination be like. I recently heard a young woman at work say:
“So I’m like, ‘You’ve been smoking.’ And he was like, ‘I was not!’”
Where do these usages come from?
There is a turn of phrase that I hear quite a lot where someone begins their response to a question with “Yes no …”. When you listen closely or see it transcribed it looks bizarre but it is common enough to just flow off the tongue. I have caught myself saying it once or twice.
Sportspeople often say it; something like, “Yeah no I wasn’t on top of my game today.”
Methinks like the initial yes or yeah is uttered before the speaker has started thinking about what to say. Sportspeople are good at starting their answers to any questions with “Yeah definitely …” whatever the question. Recently I was surprised and relieved to hear the Australian fast bowler Brett Lee not begin his answer to a reporter’s question with the automatic words but instead respond articulately and intelligently.
I was browsing images in the Atrocious Apostrophe’s [sic] group on Flickr and groaning at what I saw when I decided to click on the grammar tag associated with these images.
Here is a capture of part of that page:
I can’t wait to start bidding with wild abandon on an apostasy of apostrophes!
Update: well bugger me! Apostrophe is a brand of womens clothing. I was hoping I could bid for some curvaceous glyphs.
When you care about language, it is easy to find poor examples of its use in public and it is tempting to complain in your blog and elsewhere. What about conspicuously good use of language in public? We should acknowledge it when we see it.
This sign is an excellent example of direct and clear language. It does not use formal ‘legalese’ but there is no ambiguity about what it means.
It appears at a number of railway stations in Brisbane, where I live.
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