Blog Archive

Sunday, 12 October 2008

Grammar, Punctuation & Spelling

by Alex J Allen
aa
Why are people who work in supermarkets illiterate? Oh, of course, they work in them because they're illiterate, question solved. I'm currently picking up a few (OK, full time) hours at Tesco while I wait for a suitable employer to realise my excellent graduate credentials, and I'm taking a very Louis Theroux approach to the whole thing. It started the other day as soon as I came in to work where there was a hand written sign on one of the chillers which read, 'handel broken dont lock yourself in'. Classical music buff eh? Way to sneak that reference in to informational signage my friend, and why don't these people use commas, punctuation was free the last the time I checked. Encouraged, even.
aa
Sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as this sort of thing is concerned, brace yourself for a whole selection of bizarre plurals that don't exist. 'I've got two breads, three milks and I'm just about to go and get my meats'. No. No, no, bloody no. You have two loaves of bread, three pints of milk, and you're about to go and get your meat. The trouble is, that so many of these people talk like this, suddenly you begin to feel that you're the one not getting it. You start rationalising it, you think 'well, their way does make more sense on a very basic level, I do have three breads'. As if that isn't enough, people seem to have some basic inability to pronounce even the most widely circulated foreign words. In this new, modern, globalised world, certain basic terms have become standard use in this country, tortilla for one. I have heard 'tortilla' (as in Godzilla), 'taleela', and my personal favourite 'tequila'. Granted the latter has been uttered from just one woman, but she has become a serial offender. Her pronunciation seems so incorrect, that nobody has had the will to actually correct her so she just bumbles along, unaware of her own idiocy. There was a time, when I was surrounded in all directions by academia, that I was unsure as to how the national IQ average could be as low as 100. Now, I wonder if it's only the existence of Stephen Hawking that's keeping it in triple digits at all.

No comments: