Posted on 06/20/2012 6:30:54 AM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.
"I cringe every time I hear" people misuse "is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says.
Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications errors, many managers say.
[...]
Mr. Garner, the usage expert, requires all job applicants at his nine-employee firm—including people who just want to pack boxes—to pass spelling and grammar tests before he will hire them. And he requires employees to have at least two other people copy-edit and make corrections to every important email and letter that goes out.
"Twenty-five years ago it was impossible to put your hands on something that hadn't been professionally copy-edited," Mr. Garner says. "Today, it is actually hard to put your hands on something that has been professionally copy-edited."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Sometimes I read people spelling quiet as’ quite’.
Quite annoying really. The Brits accuse the Yanks of butchering the language. Quite bloody right ya blokes.
You forgot the "ambiguous interrogative inflection" at the end of your sentence?
you are “suppose to” not notice.
but in a “worse case” secenario, I “could care less.”
It’s expecially important that you and me use proper grammar ... irregardless of where we work.
/s
How about “irregardless”...
I know, I know... so 80’s.
I mean ... y'know .... you're right!
...irregardless of whether the young employees had been properly orientated...
“And he requires employees to have at least two other people copy-edit and make corrections to every important email and letter that goes out. “
You never begin a sentence with “And”. It’s a rule.
What r u talking about?
It might be irreversible. I wrote on another thread yesterday that I see or hear eighth-grade spelling or usage errors every single day on network news. It doesn’t matter what network or what subject. I’m not talking about complicated science terms or words — my example yesterday was the incorrect “Lamier” instead of “Larimer” county, site of the Colorado wildfires. What’s worse, some stories have it right and some have it wrong, and it’s been that way for a WEEK. So not only do they make the mistakes, nobody with a six-year-old’s reading and reasoning ability is able to do anything about it.
No one seems to remember the difference.
I doubt that many English teachers know.
Hello, cc.
—Haha, you is a looser!!!—
I think you mean “you be loosr.”
A particularly notable one that’s showed up in the last dozen years or so is by juiceboxers, using the phrase “I mean” to start every sentence.
—When I hear someone speaking and constantly sprinkling in the “like” word, I find myself not listening to what they are saying, but counting how many times they use “like”....a pet peeve of mine.—
Same here. But a long time annoyance of mine is “you know”. And “so he goes...then I go...”.
Run man, it da po-po man, it da po-po!
One of the biggest surprises of my life came when I started getting email from old high school buddies. (We all graduated in the ‘60’s.)When I saw some of the spelling and grammar I was floored. I still don’t see how some of them got through HS.
This is all egotism. These people don’t cringe they revel they get to feel superior. Meanwhile they’ve forgotten the point of language is to communicate, if people hear what you said and understand it the way you intended you said it right enough. Language evolves, suck it up.
Video: http://www.wimp.com/speaktypography/
Transcript:
In case you hadn’t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you’re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you’re, like, saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)’s- and (you know what I’m saying)’s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? You know?
Declarative sentences, so-called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true,
okay,
as opposed to other things that are, like, totally, you know, not (?)
have been infected by a totally hip and tragically cool interrogative tone?
As if I’m saying, don’t think I’m a nerd just ‘cuz I’ve, like, noticed this, okay??
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions??
I’m just, like, inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty?
What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest? You know?
Or do we have, like, nothin’ to say?
Has society become so, like, totally, like, whatever!
That we’ve become the most aggressively inarticulate culture
to come along since . . .you know, a long, long time ago!
So I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you:
To speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply
QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.
(Taylor Mali)
How about “mute point” instead of “moot point”. I see it in print and hear it as well.
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