Too long away

I've been fighting a very strong and resilient flu bug, but am now, as my mother used to say, "able to sit up and take slight nourishment." Don't forget your flu shots, folks.

So I'm back, and this morning came across a full-page ad in a national women's magazine. It was an attractive piece for a skin care "system." (We don't have products anymore; we have systems and solutions.) The ad was overwritten, flowery, full of rhetorical questions--standard stuff for skin care puffery--and bad advertising for all those reasons. However, what first caught my eye was a big, fat mistake in one line: " Then harnessed its' power in a line of of skin care products ... ."

Here comes a bold, authoritative statement. There is no such word as its'.

There is a word it's, which means it is or it has, as in, "It's been a long time since I've been to Paris," or, "It's odd she hasn't called."

There's also a word its, which is the possessive of it, as in, "The alligator opened its eyes," or, "The product's advantage is its rounded edges."

But to use the possessive and then add an apostrophe to make that possessive possessive is, to say the least, overkill. In this case, its power would have been more powerful without the extra punctuation.

On reading further, I came to the next silliness: "After using these products for 28-days ... ." There's no need for a hyphen. Just 28 days. Later in the ad, the copywriters used the hyphen correctly when they spoke of a 28-day period. In that case, 28-day is being used to modify period and calls for a hyphen. But in the fine print of the guarantee, they went back to, "... you'll see a difference in 28-days," so obviously, they don't know there's a distinction.

What's sad about this is that the client put his or her trust in a copywriter who didn't have the skills to write a basic, error-free ad. And no one on the client side knew any better, either, because someone from the company had to approve this substandard offering for display in national media.

Which tells us something about the state of English education in the United States. I can hardly wait to see the advertising in the year 2020. I think it's possible it will be even less coherent than today's--and that doesn't bode well for product sales in the future. Too bad.

Eat and die

Sometimes words that sound nearly alike have quite different meanings, and you can embarrass yourself when you use them incorrectly. For example, the words gourmand and gourmet both refer to food, but one of them is laudatory and the other is insulting. A gourmet is a person who is knowledgeable about food and appreciates fine cuisine and wine. A gourmand, on the other hand, is a hog. A glutton. Someone who will plow his or her way through whatever's on the table. So it's probably not a good idea to refer to the boss as a gourmand.

Recently, I've seen considerable confusion in another word pair: interment and internment. To inter is to bury. To intern is to confine someone to a specific location, such as a camp, usually during a time of war. So an interment is a burial and an internment is a type of imprisonment.

While I suppose we could argue that someone who's dead is imprisoned in a coffin-sized space, that's a bit of a stretch. Better to get it right than to try to talk your way out of that one.

Sometimes You Just Have to Laugh

It's giggle day around the office. I just read a wonderful description of a piece of real estate that's recently been offered for sale. The house features a private garden with a paver patio and a "coy pond." Well, that's refreshing. So many ponds these days are overbearing and pushy. Koi perhaps? As in carp?

Here's another amusing example of a proofreader's being asleep at the switch. According to an article in The Washington Post, the cholesterol drug Vytorin "didn't help slow the build-up of ... plaque in a long-awaited study." I didn't know the study was plagued by plaque. I think Vytorin is supposed to clean plaque out of arteries. A spokesman for the company says, "more favorable results" would have been preferable. Yeah.

It's not always hot

It's time to gang up on an overused word: hot. Cars are hot. Women, too. Men as well. Clothes. Shoes. On and on. The first billion times advertisers used the word, it might be been fun, amusing, sexy, trendy--or perhaps even hot. But now hot has become tepid, lukewarm, and irritating. If you're over 21, it's a word you might want to think about retiring--or at least mothballing until it comes around again in another 25 years.

Cool lasts forever. Hot doesn't.

Adding more

I've decided to claim this blog with Technorati and see what happens. Technorati Profile

Looking forward to more fun, more words, more conversation.

No matter how you try....

In the last post, I talked about "ethic" slurs. Hmmm. I wonder what those might be? Of course, it's "ethnic." I correct other people's mistakes for a living. It's just delightful to have to correct my own--in public.

However, there are Web site and blog issues more serious than typos. I read one site yesterday that went on for a bit and then began its last sentence, "Anyways." Deliver me from the final s in that one. Nonetheless, I soldiered on to the next page where the content read,"We're just chalk full of ideas." Chalk full? The only time I've even been "chalk full" was when I had to swallow barium for an x-ray. I don't recommend it.

"Chock" perhaps? As in full to the brim with ideas? That's better.

I gave a workshop today, the gist of which was that if you're not certain of the spelling or meaning of a word, for heaven's sake, look it up. Take a minute to do it right so you don't waste 10 minutes cleaning up the lousy first impression you made.

Civil Speech? Where?

In the past few days, I've been roaming various comment boards on an array of different Web sites. This is not something I usually have time to do, and now I have another good reason not to waste my time with it. These boards, with the exception of those who cater to a specific set of highly articulate readers interested in issues of substance, have become places for people to spill vast amounts of bile. When people disagree here, they don't resort to reason. They resort to character assassination, name-calling of the most vile type, ethic and racial slurs that make my head spin, bullying, and all-round nastiness.

Barack Obama wins in Iowa? Let's get on the Web and call him everything from a Communist to the N-word to a Muslim extremist bent on destroying the United States. And, of course, let's be sure not to let our invective be tempered by even rudimentary fact checking. Let's just spread our lies as fast as we can.

Britney Spears has a breakdown? Let's kick her while she's strapped to a gurney in an ambulance. Let's blame her for all the world's ills. And while we're at it, let's all state the "absolute facts" about what's happened to a young woman we've never met. Beside having excessively bad judgment, what has she done to unleash such a torrent of hateful diatribes? Has she hurt any of the people who now call on her to "do us all a favor and die"?

Behind the cloak of anonymity, people feel safe to say anything they wish. What's sad, though, is that this kind of speech is now no longer cloaked. Emboldened by what they get away with online, people say whatever they want, wherever they want, to whomever they want. It's road rage with words, assault with speech, and it goes all the way down to elementary school. If you haven't been on a 5th-grade playground lately, it's an education.

I don't have the answer, but I can urge all of us to think before we use speech to harm another, judge another, or make another's life miserable.