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A traffic sign near a preschool has some drivers asking questions. As a driver isn't it our job to obey all posted street signs, but how do you do that with this one, privately posted in front of a preschool, "please slow drively?" It has caused some perplexed reactions. "It looks like they might have done it on purpose. Is it funny? Yes, it's funny," one man said. "With people these days, I'm pretty sure it was done on purpose," a woman said.

The 12-year-old who can spell better than spelling bee judges! Little girl eliminated after judges couldn't get 'braille' rightW-R-O-N-G A young girl with an affinity for spelling was erroneously eliminated from a spelling bee in Selma, California after she allegedly misspelled the word 'braille.' According to KMPH, Sierra Shoemaker, 12, provided the correct spelling for the word, but the judges had the word spelled with one 'L' and sent her packing with a second-place finish  'I didn't really want to say anything because when the word master tells you [that you] spelled a word wrong you don't really want to argue with...

In a perfect world, students might be judged by their ideas alone -- not by whether they write "you're" or "your." But that isn't the world we live in.It happens every time. As I hand the test out to my middle school students, one of them will invariably look up, pencil at the ready, and ask, "Does spelling count?" Let's ignore the fact that my students should know better than to even ask this question in the first place. I've answered it more times than I care to remember, usually in the fall of the new school year, and it...

If you happen to care about grammar and spelling, then in these post-literate times you can expect to be considered a pedant by the semi-literate, and a "grammar nazi" by the illiterate. My blood pressure rises when I see misuses of the apostrophe, pluralization with an apostrophe, "impact" as a verb, "pro-active" in all its uses, "there is a lot" and "there is many", "He would have if he would have", among other errors familiar to the readers among whom I don't expect to see makers of such errors. Still, I realize that the battle has been lost now. Here...

I admit, I am not that great when it comes to spelling/grammar. I write a bunch of articles for free and post them up without spell checking sometimes. I make my fair share of mistakes. I DON'T GET PAID TO PROFESSIONALLY EDIT/PROOF READ FOR PRESIDENTIAL ADS THOUGH! I saw this ad online and I had to snap a copy of it. The person who designed this ad for the Obama Victory Fund 2012 does not know when to use "along" or "a long" FAIL

President Obama needed a do-over to spell “Ohio” correctly on the campus of Ohio State University this week. Although Obama and several students at a campaign stop Tuesday morning at Sloopy’s Diner on the campus of OSU tweeted out photos of the president correctly posing as the “I” in Ohio, another student supplied a photo of a spelling mishap to Mitt Romney’s campaign. The photo, tweeted by Romney’s Ohio communications director, Christopher Maloney, shows Obama and three students all a little confused about how to spell the state’s name, with Obama holding his hands up in what seems to be...

Pictures a link

t used to be we thought that people who went around correcting other people’s grammar were just plain annoying. Now there’s evidence they are actually ill, suffering from a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder/oppositional defiant disorder (OCD/ODD). Researchers are calling it Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome, or GPS. Maybe you’ve heard of the grammar gene—its technical name is the FOXP2 gene—which may be responsible for a variety of grammatical ills, such as the inability to construct compound/complex sentences or to effectively deploy the passive voice. Now there’s evidence that a variant of that gene, FOXP2.1, may actually cause us to obsessively correct other...

So I doubt that, if I had lived in Bolton, I would have gone within a quarter mile of “The Flying Shuttle”, described by the Daily Mail as probably the “toughest pub” in Britain. It appeared to be open all the time, in defiance of the licensing laws, not because the landlord held an open house but simply because the bar staff were too frightened to call time. In the end it took thirteen police officers to close it down and even then there was a mini riot.

For no reason in particular, I thought it would be helpful (or irritating, depending upon your point of view) to post a list of words that are commonly misspelled or improperly used on FreeRepublic. Feel free to add any of your own. I realize that this will open me up to greater scrutiny of the orthographic composition of my own future posts, but alas; so be it. Aid = help vs. Aide=assistant (as in “an aide to Congressman Frank”) Anointed (NOT “annointed”) Border (as in the line between U.S. and Mexico) (NOT “boarder” as in the guy who gets a...

I think the judges would give this to him...

Many brilliant people have some communication weak spots. Unfortunately, the reality is that written communication is a big part of business, and how you write reflects on you. Poor spelling and grammar can destroy a professional image in an instant.Even if your job doesn't require much business writing, you'll still have emails to send and notes to write. And if you're looking for a job, your cover letters and resumes will likely mean the difference between getting the interview or not.Bad grammar and spelling make a bad impression. Don't let yourself lose an opportunity over a simple spelling or grammar...

Each time Libya appears in the news, scores of newspaper editors go bananas. Once possessed of faculties that could detect a breaking story as readily as a dangling participle, these poor souls are now reduced to a jabbering stupor, as though they had gazed into the tentacled maw of Cthulhu himself. Blame it on the name of the country's head of state, Colonel Gaddafi. Wait, no, that's Kaddafi. Or maybe it's Qadhafi. Tell you what, we'll just call him by his first name, which is, er ... hoo boy. Part of the problem here is that there's no universally accepted...

How do you spell the crazy Libyan dictator's name? He has been around for years and nobody can seem to agree on a proper English spelling. Some use a "Q" and others use a "K" or a "G." Whatever the spelling the namesake is an embattled terroristic dictator hoping to keep his regime in power. But let us explore possibilities.

I've decided today is "Pile On Biden Day." or... The Looking Spoon is a conservative humor/satire/art/commentary blog, visit www.thelookingspoon.com to see more posts and art

SOUTH BEND — If you ever wondered how much difference just one letter can make when it comes to a message, ask the thousands of people who drove by a digital billboard near the intersection of Ironwood and State Road 23 between Thursday and Monday morning. The ad urged people to go to the "southbendon.com" website for a look at the "15 best things about our pubic schools." That's right, the billboard said "pubic" instead of "public" schools. The letter "L" had been left out of the word public. Lee MacMillan of South Bend said his wife spotted the error...

SOUTH BEND — If you ever wondered how much difference just one letter can make when it comes to a message, ask the thousands of people who drove by a digital billboard near the intersection of Ironwood and State Road 23 between Thursday and Monday morning. The ad urged people to go to the "southbendon.com" website for a look at the "15 best things about our pubic schools." That's right, the billboard said "pubic" instead of "public" schools. The letter "L" had been left out of the word public. Lee MacMillan of South Bend said his wife spotted the error...

SOUTH BEND — If you ever wondered how much difference just one letter can make when it comes to a message, ask the thousands of people who drove by a digital billboard near the intersection of Ironwood and State Road 23 between Thursday and Monday morning. The ad urged people to go to the "southbendon.com" website for a look at the "15 best things about our pubic schools." That's right, the billboard said "pubic" instead of "public" schools. The letter "L" had been left out of the word public. Lee MacMillan of South Bend said his wife spotted the error...

The Scripps National Spelling Bee highlights what a mess the English spelling is – a hodgepodge of orthographies borrowed from German, French, Greek, and Latin. Is it time for a makeover? The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word "fish" could legitimately be spelled "ghoti," by using the "gh" sound from "enough," the "o" sound from "women," and the "ti" sound from "action." Shaw was probably not the originator of this joke, but he was one of a long line of people who thought that the English language's anarchic spelling, a hodgepodge of Germanic,...

... The first national spelling bee was held in 1925, and this year's competition will feature 273 spellers from the U.S. and around the world. Interestingly, English is not even the first language of 21 of those spellers, and Scripps reports that 102 of the contestants speak other languages, from Hebrew to Hindi. Given this amazing diversity united under one language, the author of America's first dictionary and the originator of uniform spelling in America (which makes the Bee possible!) would be proud. That's Noah Webster, to whom the Bee owes its official dictionary, "Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary." Webster...