Growing Bolder Community
Just another WordPress site
Fined for Good Grammar!
Grammar Slammers- Last Online: Mar 03 2010
Fined for Good Grammar!
PHOENIX (AP) — When it comes to marking up historic signs, good grammar is a bad defense.
Two self-styled vigilantes against typos who defaced a more than 60-year-old, hand-painted sign at Grand Canyon National Park were sentenced to probation and banned from national parks for a year.
Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson pleaded guilty Aug. 11 for the damage done March 28 at the park's Desert View Watchtower. The sign was made by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, the architect who designed the rustic 1930s watchtower and other Grand Canyon-area landmarks.
Deck and Herson, both 28, toured the United States this spring, wiping out errors on government and private signs. They were interviewed by NPR and the Chicago Tribune, which called them "a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation."
An affidavit by National Park Service agent Christopher A. Smith said investigators learned of the vandalism from an Internet site operated by Deck on behalf of the Typo Eradication Advancement League, or TEAL.
Authorities said a diary written by Deck reported that while visiting the watchtower, he and Herson "discovered a hand-rendered sign inside that, I regret to report, contained a few errors."
The fiberboard sign has yellow lettering with a black background. Deck wrote that they used a marker to cover an erroneous apostrophe, put the apostrophe in its proper place with white-out and added a comma.
The misspelled word "emense" was not fixed, Deck wrote, because "I was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further. ... Still, I think I shall be haunted by that perversity, emense, in my train-whistle-blighted dreams tonight."
Deck, of Somerville, Mass., and Herson, of Virginia Beach, Va., pleaded guilty to conspiracy to vandalize government property.
They were sentenced to a year's probation, during which they cannot enter any national park or modify any public signs. They were also ordered to pay $3,035 to repair the watchtower sign.
The TEAL Web site now has only this message — "Statement on the signage of our National Parks and public lands to come" — without a period.
Information from: The Arizona Republic, http://www.azcentral.com
Bernie- Last Online: May 26 2012
Ken Chevy- Last Online: Oct 20 2010
Bernie- Last Online: May 26 2012
Ken Chevy- Last Online: Oct 20 2010
As a college English teacher, and grammar-watcher, I can understand why the two did what they did even though I would have never acted on the impulse. It drives me bonkers to see signs, etc., with grammar and spelling mistakes, especially when they've been created by sign companies. I mentally edit everything I read so, maybe, on second thought, I should just get a life!
Have a great day.
Bernie
Reguards,
Ken
093110 0242
Ken - Regards to you, too, and, thanks for the good laugh! Bernie
You're more than welcome, Bernie.
It is as if: OH, we are on the Internet now, NO reason to at least TRY to type words correctly.
I think I really do believe America is getting more stupid by the second. One person in a different thread on a different website, when it was brought to the threads attention about the poor grammar and misspellings stated:"It doesn't matter. It isn't as if I were speaking in front of an audience."
I posted that that was not true. That we ARE speaking in front of an audience that contains THOUSANDS at times and that they DO (a certain amount of those reading his post) judge him by his grammar and spelling. Wow, he didn't like that at all.
Why can't the run of the mill person understand that? That it matters not whether we are speaking with our mouth OR our fingers? Too dense mentally? Maybe.
I guess I used to be that way, 'sort of'. Then when I went through my 'try everything out' phase thirty plus years ago, and ingested about everything that was handed to me, from LSD, blotter acid, Orange Sunshine, Purple MicroDot and on and on, this from a person who never tasted alcohol until I was nineteen and with that first partial beer figured out I wasn't missing anything, no thank you, somewhere, somehow... jumped a few dozen steps on the IQ scale and acquired an 'editors' mind.
The way mine works is: Even if I don't know how a word is spelled, I KNOW it is misspelled 99% of the time. I just 'know' it. It doesn't 'feel' correct. Since I sneaked through school receiving C's, D's, and F's, I have come to regret that part of my life a lot.
Here I am, bumbling around knowing the way things are supposed to be, yet never laid a good solid foundation for later years. Talk about stupid, that was one of the most stupid things I ever did. So now I don't know how things are spelled or how grammar works, yet I work at it, a little bit at a time, teaching myself, oh so slowly, things I should have learned forty, fifty or more years ago.
Yet, I observe the 'so called' educated college people of today and can state honestly that a LARGE percentage of them seem to have never learned either.
That is just going to get worse I would wager.
So much fun in life! We must enjoy it now, because all too soon it will be gone.
Enjoy, Bernie!
Ken
090110 1507
P.S. The misspellings and wrong grammar in this post is to give you something to do! LOL
