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November 27, 2007

Fun Sites for "Wasting" Time at "Work"

What? There are unnecessary quotation marks in the title? Better report this to the good people over at The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. I especially like the ones with people selling "chicken" "hamburgers" or "maple syrup".

The blog that started my obsession with punctuation police was Apostrophe Abuse, which is my pet peeve. It blows my mind that somewhere out there stands a tombstone that says, "MOM - Alway's there for us."

hamburgerquotation.JPGLiterally a Web Log is dedicated to tracking the abuse of the word "literally". To clarify the problem: It should be used to distinguish between a figurative and a literal meaning of a phrase. It should not be used as a synonym for “actually” or “really.”

I was "literally" amazed to discover that there is an entire blog about people using all caps except for a lowercase L. I didn't even know this was so prevalent. You have to see it to believe it.

And it seems that the lowercase i is also a big problem. A Tittle is the name for the dot on the top of the i. Who knew?

Haven't had enough yet? Apostrophism goes after a wider array of mistakes, a form of research the blogger refers to as grammarology.

The British Grammarblog is a little more indepth, written from one person's viewpoint as opposed to a collection of submissions. But it's really funny, especially the SOTP signs.

And of course, one of my favorites, The Grammar Vandal..

Thank God they are not going after "bloggers".


Photo courtesy of The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks.

Disclaimer: I know there are sentence fragments in this post.

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Comments (3) [rss]

In a similar vein, seeing how non-English speakers mis-translate things is pretty amusing.

http://engrish.com/

 

Yeah, I love that one!

Keep those recommendations coming, because this post is only the beginning. I'm a champion internet time-waster.

 

These sites are great!

I always try to snap photos of signs that have random capitalization and strange punctuation. This one has both:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michelereverte/727603273/

 
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