Apostrophe Atrophy

Billboard on the freeway:

THE
BIG
DIP
GRAND RAPIDS
ONLY WATER PARK

I can see the choice to ignore all punctuation. It's graphically eye-catching. It makes me want to go there. But on first read, I do a full stop after "Grand Rapids."

The Big Dip. Grand Rapids. Only water park.

If they're punctuation-averse, OK. But I submit that the apostrophe making G.R. possessive must be there... not only because it's correct, but to signal that the next line is a part of the same sentence.

Then, there's this:
I saw this sign days after buying a house sign for "The Sanders'". It made me think of the two minutes spent discussing its punctuation. The lady who was making the sign said there needn't be any, because we're answering the question:

Who lives here?
The Sanders family. The Sanders. Or: The Sanderses.

I argued:
It's not an answer to a question, it's a statement: this is the Sanders' residence.

Luckily, she was not up for a spirited debate. And, I was the one paying. I'm right, yes? If not, it's already mounted on a house...

Gimme Buffet*

Is there a difference between ALL YOU CAN EAT and ALL YOU CARE TO EAT? We've got both options in town. It seems that, for gluttons, all they care to eat will be all they can eat. But for temperate souls, all they can eat will probably be all they care to eat, as well. Because as soon as they're full, they'll stop. I suppose that feeling full isn't the same as truly being full to the top.


MAÎTRE D: And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint.
MR. CREOSOTE: Nah.
MAÎTRE D: Oh, sir, it's only a tiny, little, thin one.
MR. CREOSOTE: Look. I couldn't eat another thing. I'm absolutely stuffed. Bugger off.
MAÎTRE D: Oh, sir, just-- just one.
MR. CREOSOTE: All right. Just one.

Since I'll never actually open this store, I'm going to give away my idea for a restaurant that includes an all-you-can-eat ice cream buffet. This place will have 50 flavors, 50 toppings, whipped cream, the works. Its name: Any Given Sundae. If you steal this idea, please give credit.

*I'm struggling with titles lately. If you've got one for this post, let me know. The Jimmy/Gimme Buffett/Buffet just isn't happening. I was thinking Buffet The Vampire Slayer, but that made no sense at all.

Feeling A Little Tense

A comment came my way recently as a friendly reminder:
Aren't you supposed to be railing against misuse of the subjunctive tense (SUB-TEN)? Whatever happened to SPASTIC?

Oh. Yeah. That.

Well, I wanted to make a nice sidebar on the right with a permanent link where anyone could post his or her latest subjunctive picks or pans. But I don't know how to do that, and I don't want to figure it out right now.
But here are a couple that have been in my head lately:

PICK: A song by Rooney that's been in my head, If It Were Up to Me. Yes, boys, yes. Simple, no? Sounds nice, yes? Yes.
A sample lyric:

'Cause our love (our love)
Is the best love (best love)
If it were up to me
Yes, our love (our love)
Oh, is real love
So just let it be

It really gets in your head. Love Rooney.

PAN: Grisham. I know, too easy a target. I just finished reading The Last Juror. It's from last year. I finally got around to reading it because it's about a guy who makes a ton of money running a small-town newspaper. I knew that was a sweet racket! Any-hoo, he pretty much ignores subjunctive mood completely. After a couple offenses, I decided to start dog-earing pages. It got ridiculous and I stopped.
Just a couple representative examples:

"Baggy leaned over as if it was time to whisper"
"If a valid arrest warrant was obtained..."

Now, one may be tempted to forgive the offenses, as the book is told in first person, and perhaps the narrator simply doesn't know any better. But on the same page as the "whisper" line, is this:

"...he was smiling a lot, as if he were really a nice kid..."

See? Very nice. As Rooney points out in If It Were Up To Me:

It's easy (easy)
It's easy (easy)
It's easy...

Now, With Less Incompetence!

It's graduation season, which means that it's time again to reinforce the bad habits of misspellers. Even though "Congradulations!" is a fairly clever wordplay, it's encouraging those who spell it that way year-round to continue.
The same goes for those who call their elementary school arboretum a "kinder-garden". It's not helping.

Back to graduation. Our local bakery has a sign advertising:

CAKES
FOR GRAD'S

Sigh. On this same sign, it advertises the ability to place a photo of your child on the cake. It then proclaims this guarantee:

IF WE LOSE YOUR PHOTO, THE CAKE IS FREE!

Do most people go in assuming their photo will be lost? Is this a big problem? And now that it's in print, will folks be hoping the photo gets lost so they can cash in on the free-cake deal? I would hope that if they lost my photo, a free cake would be the least they would do. Advertising this is baffling to me.

For the record, I'm all for cake. Big fan. Photo ones, especially. If I can enjoy a sugar high and eat your face, that's just icing on the cake.

Great Expectations

I saw this sign in a parking lot yesterday:

RESERVED FOR
EXPECTING MOTHERS

Are we doing that now, making expecting an adjective? Because it's not. I don't think. I've been wrong before.
In a Googlefight, "expecting mothers" get a respectable 35,400 while "expectant mothers" kills it with 253,000.

Is it that the phrase "she's expecting", with [a baby] understood, makes expecting seem like an adjective?

All I know is that when I see this sign, I expect to see mothers with their children, standing in the space, looking out to the horizon, as if a UFO is about to land.

Dis Or Dat

A few years back, we started seeing these signs pop up around Michigan:


Kind of a clever rhyme... making "ticket" mean "get a ticket" is a bit of a stretch. Literally, it sounds more like "If you don't buckle up, you will give someone a ticket", but for the sake of the meter, it gets a pass.

Lately, this has been the new signage:



Now we have two competing if-this-then-that slogans. Is this necessary? Or is this how it played out:

BOB: OK, everyone, I'm Bob, and I'm the new guy here. My first task will be to implement a fresh, new slogan: "Buckle Up or Pay Up."
GUY #1: Hey! I liked Click It or Ticket!
GUY #2: Yeah! That was Fred's idea! I like Fred!
Guy #3: Yeah!
[murmurs of dissent--shouts of "yeah!" are heard over the walla-walla]
FRED: Yeah!
BOB: OK, fine. we'll compromise and use both. But I get top billing. And it's no longer a "law you can live with." That line was crap.

I mean, really. I get it. If I do not use my safety belt, I will owe someone money. I don't need it twice. One phrase does not add to the other, it just makes the sign compete with itself. I'm afraid next year, we'll have:



Stop the insanity now.

Article Man*

The Episcopal church has this on its marquee this week:

BLESSED IS THE NATION WHOSE GOD IS LORD

I saw it as I drove by, then circled the block and drove by again, then wrote it down to make sure I remembered it correctly. I puzzled over this for the 15 minutes it took me to get to Google™.
I took it that, since this church was situated in a midwestern farm town, the God of whom they spoke was the God of Benedict and DeMille. But the text leaves some wiggle room here. I read it as:

"Blessed is the nation which puts its God first."

Am I wrong? Is this not the reading? Of course, there are many gods to choose from. We can assume that in the US (or the West, even), that protestants, Catholics, Jews and others can all get behind Yahweh as its Lord. But is this sign saying that the nations who put Buddha or Allah first are equally blessed? It's a very PC-sounding idea, but not one I thought these particular Episcopalians were advancing.

After these musings, I check out biblegateway.com. I quickly found that the sign was (almost) quoting Psalm 33:12:

Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he chose for his inheritance.

And there it is. The missing article the. This helps quite a bit. Now I know that it's not any-old god. It's not "whose god is lord", it's "whose God is The Lord. Now, it's clear that the blessed nations are the ones who follow a very specific God. Whew. Now I can get back to thinking about Amazing Race 8.

Now Playing: Good Morning Beautiful, The The

*I really wanted to title this Articles of the Confederation of Dunces, because I liked the wordplay. But it sounded like I was making fun of the church... so it's an asterisk.

Just So You Know

A Newsweek article about a new robot mopper has the CEO saying:

"We are not just going to replace mopping, we are going to obsolete it," Angle says.

"Obsolete it." That's OK, you know, obsolete as transitive verb. Perfectly correct usage. Just in case anyone thinks it's weird. It's not. It didn't sound strange to me, either. Just thought people should know. If folks want to passé the usage, they'll need to talk to Merriam. Or Webster.

Me, I never thought anything of it.

Do Glass Bulls Have Crystal Balls?

Here's a joke from sixth grade.

Did you see the newspaper article about the midget fortuneteller who escapes from prison? The headline read:

SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE


note: I'm conflicted about my headline. I'll be changing it in 24 hours. On the one hand, I wanted it out there. On the other hand, I feel cheap. This is a family blog. Yet, there it is.
update: I'm keeping it, for now. I still feel cheap.

Judg Not Lest Ye Be Judgd

It happened again. I sat down to write about my catching a huge language gaffe, only to find that it is acceptable usage. In today's installment, the one I was sure was correct is actually in the minority. DANGIT!

On the American Idol finale (I wasn't watching. I saw it, um, in a shop window while I was, ah, on my way to the theatre. Yeah, yeah.. that's the ticket...), there was a big splash screen for some dramatic intro that read:

JUDGMENT DAY

and I said to my wife "did you see that? They spelled 'judgement' wrong!"
To which she replied:

"..."

After Carrie won (I mean, after I returned from the Merry Wives of Windsor premiere), I jumped online and found that my spelling is preferred in the UK, Australia, India, South Africa and Hong Kong. It is pretty much THE spelling in Canada (woot!). But in the US, it's quite frowned upon. One site blamed Noah Webster for this, and has a picture of an ass next to "judgement". Hey, now!

Then we have these guys:
The Alliance for the Preservation of the Correct Spelling of the Word "Judgment"
How uptight do you have to be to create a fictional Society that picks one tiny corner of the English language to obsess over? Puhleeze...

Also found that the Brits/Canucks use "judgment" in legal documents, but "judgement" elsewhere. Huh.

Dictionary.com called me a variant speller. I guess at least it didn't say "deviant speller." And I'm sticking with "theatre", too.

King of Cyan

This just in: the black mold that has recently infected SPASTIC HQ may not even be black. A local library was stricken with the stuff, and we're told that:

...Black mold, or Stachybotrys, isn't always black. [some mold expert] said it grows in many colors.

Well, then, "black mold" is not such a great name, is it?
I realize that "Grows-in-many-colors Mold" is a mouthful. But at least it's accurate. Rainbow mold, perhaps. Like rainbow sherbet, which is, of course, a lie as well. Three-colored sherbet is, by my count, four flavors short of a rainbow.
Guess what? The Red Sea is not red. And they call Donovan "Mellow Yellow," when he's white.
Huh.

Rate Greed

Got kids? No? Get some! Now! Go! Borrow, if need be! Inter-library loan, whatever! Grab a kid, then check this out...

The new Shel Silverstein book of spoonerism poetry,Runny Babbit, is laugh-out-loud funny (pardon mon idiom, but it is). It's a collection of previously-unpublished work (he died in 1999).

The book was a gift for my four-year-old, and she likes the book's fun cadence and nonsense. But it's even more fun to read with my seven-year old, who picks up on what's happening. It plays out like this:

1. Read a line
2. Pause a beat, wait for him to decode it and laugh
3. Repeat

Here's a taste...

RUNNY BABBIT HUTS HIS OWN CAIR
Runny gave himself a cairhut
(But he would not admit it).
When his scamma molded him,
He said, "The darber bid it."
So she went to bee the sarber.
The swarber said "I bear
I did not souch one tingle head
Upon your little hare."

The punchline is cute, but darber/sarber/swarber is the clincher for me. Elsewhere in the book, he has a rhyme about "sea poup." My four-year-old gets that one.

Mos Ded

The trailer for Mr. & Mrs. Smith tells us that the main characters "...are the world's most deadly assassins..."

Was my reaction to this commercial:
A It's good to see the guy from Thelma & Louise getting work.
B Angelina Jolie in leather + Expensive Explosions = This summer's biggest blockbuster!
C Yes! Appropriate use of the superlative!

Sadly, as you've guessed, it was C. Why? Take a look at this excerpt from a Money magazine article about a GAO report on crash tests:

Rollovers are among the most deadliest crashes, accounting for about 8 percent of accidents but about a third of all occupant fatalities.

More and more, I'm hearing (assumably) intelligent folks refer to something as "most deadliest." I realize that the Money article places rollovers "among" the most deadliest. Are they off the hook? I'm sticking with "among the deadliest." Is it that, in the 21st century, there are many, many things out there that are the "deadliest", and we must make sure people know which of these deadliest is the worst? How much more deadly can something be? Perhaps:

• The All-New Roach Motel! Now kills roaches 25% deader than before!

• You thought the deer you killed last season was dead? With the new Remington 7667 Pump Action Rifle, your next deer will be even more dead!

• Lita Ford is back with her new single, "Kiss Me Most Deadliest"!*

BTW, Mr. & Mrs. Smith does look like it'll be the most funniest action movie this summer.

*This last one was stupid, but I wanted three and I don't want to spend more than ten minutes on this.

The Wonderful Thing About Taggers

Just came from a restroom where this pithy insight was scrawled:

PIMP
IS AS
PIMP
DOSE

Is this a line from Snoop Dogg's latest effort, Forrest Pimp? Or is it that there is a pharmaceutical measurement for escort managers called a "pimp dose"? Alas, probably a typo. If only Sharpie®s came with spellcheck, it would have... well, actually, not seen anything wrong. Right.

I am not a fan of graffiti. Free speech, yes. Artistic expression, yes. But not Vandalism. Even when they call it "tagging", making it seem more a job requirement than a crime, I cannot buy it. Even the sweet ones.

But.

10 or more years ago, I stopped at a rest area in Georgia, and saw the only graffiti that has ever made me laugh out loud. It's not original anymore, but at the time it was groundbreaking to me.
Before this moment, hot air hand dryer graffiti had pretty basic rules:

1. scratch out the "w" in "warm" and the word "air" so instructions read "rub hands under (w)arm (air)."
2. scratch "3. wipe hand on pant" below instructions.

For some reason, it was almost always the singular "hand" and "pant". Maybe curvy esses are hard to scratch. Any-hoo. Text-based instuctions for hand dryers were replaced with iconographic ones, much like the manual for anything made by Little Tikes®. Some time passed where people still scratched the "wipe hands" line, but it didn't really make sense without the other text-based instructions.

Then, that day in GA, where I see this:



It took me so by surpise I laughed out loud. It echoed. Guys looked.
Now, I see this graffiti around. There's even a T-shirt. At the time, though: wow. Wherever you are, bacon-joke man, mad props.

So, in conclusion: graffiti is bad. Stay in school. If unsure of correct Pimp Dosage, please consult with your doctor or pharmacist.

System of a Noun

SPASTIC HQ is in the process of getting new linoleum in the kitchen. We've asked Luan to supervise the process, since she's the flooring expert. I'm just a layperson, and definitely not an underlayperson.

Yes, I did it. It's the first Luan joke for this site. Look for our series of gypsum board gags later this year.

Any-hoo, it reminded me of the nouned word "install." As in:
"He's not in. He's out on an install."
"We can schedule your install for a month from now."

In our neck of the woods, the nouned version is to be pronounced with emphasis on the first syllable, I believe to make the distinction from an outstall.

Finally, if you are interested in picking up some construction slang, this guy's site is quite interesting, and amusing. Especially his definition of "wigger" as one who wigs out. Huh. Even in his context, I will not be using this word.

What Hits!?

So, craziness has made it so a lull must occur at SPASTIC. Between Eunice's visits with the Rhodes Scholar people, Vin's experimentations with a new top-secret curry dish ("Super-Curry Fantastic" is its working title), and Gabriel's involvement in fixing the hydraulics on his '76 Impala, we just don't have the manpower to create.

But many of you are new here. Please take the next few days to check out some of our favorite posts to date:

50 Cent is the new Warhol
The Gwen Stefani Piece
Dead Parrot
Me For You and Euphemism
The Association Game
Juan, sense nerds!
50 Nifty
I i, Therefore IM check out qflux's comments here. way funny.

FW: Re: Visit

Now that I know Bill Walsh watches Survivor, I feel better about this post.

Tonight, Jeff Probst told contestants about to tackle a best-of Immunity Challenge that they would have "a second chance to revisit challenges from the past."

So... is this their third chance?

I know, it's cheap and pointless to pick on the speech of reality TV people. But, in the words of Gob Bluth, COME ON!

FW:Re: SPic:ed H am Re::cipes!

I realize there's really no point in making fun of horribly disjointed spam-filter-deceiving junk mail. But this was the subject line from one I just got:

In the site you can acquire cheep mads damn

It's almost as if the fellow spilled something while entering the subject and continued to type.

Another Fine Meth

Are billboards meant to be read on the first drive-by? It seems that would be the goal, but many are so hard to follow, it takes a few viewings. I know that many viewers will drive by an ad at least once a day, but I still think they should be easy to follow on first blush.*

One I pass every day has the headline:
CHILDREN IN METH HOUSES

and the first time that's all I got. I figured what followed would be:
SHOULD NOT THROW STONES

Didn't make sense, really, but many don't. Next day I saw:
CHILDREN IN METH HOUSES
STOP IT! STOP IT!

which was quite puzzling. The second part sounds like a child yelling at a sibling ("quit it!"). Then I figured the child is actually yelling at the parent who is running the meth lab: "stop it, mom!" OK, I guess.
I was wrong. Next day, I see it's actually
CHILDREN IN METH HOUSES
SPOT IT! STOP IT!

So I am to be on the lookout for meth houses with kids in them. And stop... "it." It being, I assume, children... in houses.

I get that I'm actually looking for the existence of these children, and I get that in reporting the condition, I might actually put a tweaker out of commission ("No, sir, just here for the kid. You go on back to your business").
I just don't want to think that hard about a billboard.

I liked "stop it stop it" better.

*A separate complaint is the horrible boards going up with scoreboard-style videos running. What is the point of that? To make an already distracting commute worse? In the words of Gob Bluth, COME ON!

U B LN

They Might Be Giants has a new CD called "Here Come the ABCs." It's allegedly for kids, but that's just a clever ruse to up sales. The songs are funny, experimental and clever. This is not Barney. It's not even Sharon, Lois & Bram. And I love S,L&B (especially Sharon).

These are guys who know how to mess with words. Check out TMBG's song "ICU":

U R N X
U R N X, N I, I M N X
I C TV
I C TV, N I C U
I C U, I C U, N U R OK
U R N X
U R N X, N I, I W
I C A TV, I C A DVD, N I C U
I C U, I C U, N U R OK
I C U, I C U, N U R OK

These guys are so sweet.