Otter's Rock

I am a pedant and a grammar geek.  I'm normally the one who gets tweaked by apostrophes in the wrong place and always notices when someone uses the wrong word and it really tweaks me off.  (The large annoyance factor has to do with my Aspergers, I'm pretty sure.)  (Which is why I was so surprised that this weekend at the synod's youth gathering I wasn't the one to spot the repeating error in the devotion directions--it said "scared" instead of "sacred," so there was like a whole page talking about "scared space," and once somebody pointed it out to me it was pretty funny, especially considering it's October and I'm on the board of a group planning a small haunted house in town.)

But, anyway, in fic I can usually tell when someone has too much reliance on their spellchecker and not enough on an actual dictionary to make sure they're using the right word.

Today I spotted a perennial favorite: "rouge" instead of "rogue"

Rogue (the word they meant) means "a person who is dishonest or immoral; a man who causes trouble in a playful way."  "Rogue" is also the name of one of the X-Men, and the name of Luke Skywalker's squadron in Star Wars.

Rouge, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned word for red (well, in English it's old fashioned, in French it's the regular word for it), and also an old-fashioned name for certain types of makeup, usually what we now call "blush" (i.e. the red stuff you put on your cheeks to give you color).  The nightclub Moulin Rouge (the setting for the movie of the same name) means "The Red Mill," so named for the red windmill on top of the building.

Having your hard-bitten investigators sitting around a table talking about bringing in someone who  "went rouge" is, er, unexpectedly humorous and gives me a mental picture of someone being brought in under arrest for being a drag queen or something similar, or possibly turning into a can-can dancer.  Not quite the effect the author was going for ...

This is one reason why betas are a good thing, because they (hopefully) catch things like this.  And I don't care how good a writer you are, everyone does this sometimes (or has a computer do it for you when it autocorrects incorrectly and you don't notice ....)

What are your favorite (or least favorite) perennial typos/misspellings/homonym abuses/malapropisms?

So, here I am, working on my homework for Epistles (the study of Paul's letters, both those we know are his and those that were probably only attributed to him). We're starting with Philemon, which has always been one of my favorites (short, sweet, and to the point--and boy, what a point) even though it's not one you see often. It's just so wonderfully ironic and slippery, lots of fun to read (and only 25 verses total!). The assignment is to translate the first seven verses and answer a number of questions about them. Question number 8b:

"What is the affect of what Paul claims he does in v. 4?"

I suppose there is a slight (very slight) possibility he really meant to use affect instead of effect--the effect of Paul's claim causes an affect in the readers, after all. But I highly doubt it.

This man has a doctorate. He teaches at a grad school. He hasn't learned to proof-read better than that?

And yes, I know, it's one of my pet peeves and I doubt anyone else will notice it, and it's not like any of his degrees are in English, probably. Still. Aargh!

Edited To Add: he did it again in question 17!

I was just reading a story that I like very much. Imagine my horror when one of my pet peeves was found in the very first paragraph of the newest chapter!

I absolutely hate modern educational methods that don't bother to teach people proper grammar!

"Mr. Santos told both she and David ..." [Names have been changed to protect the innocent]

It should be "her," not "she." Think of it this way: you would never say "Mr. Santos told she ..." would you? The appropriate form of pronoun does not change when you add other nouns to it. For the same reason, "Mr. Santos told David and I" is not proper grammar because "Mr. Santos told I" is not proper grammar. I know it sounds more formal the other way, but it is incorrect!

And if modern school systems would do their job, people would know this! Aargh! /rant


This public service announcement was brought to you by Grammar Geeks, USA.