As someone who cares deeply about grammar (deeply, people—deeply), I'm always depressed when I see grammar mistakes out and about in my community. But the ones that really get me are the ones I see in schools. I especially love it when my kids bring home notes from their teachers that include incorrect grammar. Really gives me a lot of confidence in their abilities, you know?
I've also become rather grouchy in my old age about things that aren't necessarily incorrect, but just overdone—like using exclamation points in every sentence, capping every word in a tagline, and other annoyances.
The other night, S and I attended a PTA awards ceremony in which my sister-in-law was being honored. She's a sixth grade teacher and was chosen as "Teacher of the Year" for her school. Pretty cool, huh? The event was held at my husband's old high school, which has been completely overhauled in recent years. Painted on the wall in the main lobby was this message: "Welcome to THE (school name) HIGH SCHOOL."
Really? "THE"? I told my husband about it and we decided it should have been "AN" since technically, there are three high schools in that town.
Also, on one of the PowerPoint slides during the award presentation, an elementary school "principle" was honored.
Depressing. Just depressing, I tell you.
Friday, March 4, 2011
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2 comments:
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The inappropriate use of quotation marks all over BYU campus always irritated me. I'm hoping that in all their renovations over the years they have managed to fix their public punctuation. In particular, I always wondered who said "No Admittance" as quoted on the back doors of the ASB.
At Christmas time, we attended the middle school choir concert. All the teachers involved in the music department have graduate degrees in addition to the standard bachelor's degree. And yet, in the concert etiquette section of the program, we were instructed to "applause" if we enjoyed the performance. And then we were further (3-4 more times) instructed about when it was appropriate to "applause" during the performance. Sadly no one seemed to have grasped the difference between a noun and a verb in all their educational preparations. That is difficult for me to applaud.
It seems that the author of your PowerPoint was never told the principle that in elementary school, your principal is your PAL. Maybe if they had, s/he would have spelled appropriately.
I feel your pain; I share your pain.
Like Angie, I share a dislike for such errors. Our local newspaper has the frequently and it irritates me greatly. I have to admit, I love Google Chrome because it can help my dear husband with his spelling. Genius idea!
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