Spelling is a very rigid branch of the tree of knowledge, and some people fall off it on a regular basis. The problem begins in grade school, where weekly spelling tests can engender sweaty palms before and despairing puzzlement after. You were sure there was only one r in embarrass! How can there be only one e in judgment? Can anyone make sense of misled (mizzled?) or forearmed (for-earmed?). Why does dispirited have only one s?
The answer is simple and complicated: English is a mongrel of astonishingly mixed parentage. And like all mongrels, it displays exceptional vigor and a hodgepodge of traits.
The language began, more or less, with the Angles, for whom England is named. They were one of several peoples to overrun that green and pleasant land, along with fellow Germanic-speaking Saxons and Gaelic- and Gaulish-speaking Celts, not to mention marauding Danes, Norsemen, and Vikings. Some of the marauders stayed and founded settlements, such as the Viking outpost that became the great city of York. The languages spoken by these peoples had little or no written expression. Even if there was a writing system, there was no need to write for a population that couldn’t read, material to write on was rare and expensive, and the rulers were little different from the ruled in refinement and education.
The Romans brought luxurious baths, straight roads, and straiter Latin, which became the common language, spoken and written, of the educated in every Roman-occupied territory. The arrival of Christianity vastly increased the spread of Latin, so that eventually even humble serfs were exposed to it in church. Along with Latin came Greek, because when Rome conquered the Greeks, they recognized the superiority of the Greek culture in the arts, sciences, and other fields, and Greek became the language of the Roman upper class. A great many Latin words have Greek roots, and much of the vast English lexicon derives directly or indirectly from Latin.
The fall of Rome brought on the Dark Ages, and the young Roman Catholic Church struggled to protect its heritage through the monasteries, which served as centers of learning and repositories of knowledge. Outside the monasteries, the unschooled masses went about their hard daily lives, and the highly structured language of the Romans began to devolve and meld with the vernacular tongues of the natives and the invaders from points north and east, which themselves devolved to lesser complexity and precision. The Romance languages, principally Italian, French, and Spanish, retained gender distinctions for masculine and feminine but lost neuter; they also lost case distinctions for nouns other than pronouns, letting position determine a word’s function within a sentence. They retained multiple verb conjugations and a different suffix for almost every person for every tense and mood.
English devolved further than the Romance languages. It gave up gender distinctions altogether except in reference to creatures that actually had gender. It did so despite its origin as a Germanic tongue that used all three genders, as present-day German still does. I have never seen the point of assigning gender to nouns. When gender determines declension, it makes sense. The nominative ending tells you the gender; for instance, in Latin, -us is (generally) masculine, -a is feminine, and -um is neuter, and each is inflected differently to form the genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative cases. (Never knew what English was missing, did you? Actually, English does retain some of this, but only for pronouns, and you’ve been inflecting them for case since you first imbibed grammar with your mother’s milk.) But when inflections for case and declension disappear, so do gender clues. Remembering the perfectly arbitrary gender of every single noun becomes an enormous effort. Also, associating gender with the word rather than the person leads to needless ambiguity. In French, both His Majesty and Her Majesty are Sa Majesté, because the word majesté is feminine. This makes no sense to me. If someone says “Go wake up Sa Majesté,” do you go to the king’s chambers or the queen’s?
Just as it had done away with gender, English also gave up making adjectives agree with their nouns in number. We have one blue flower and five blue flowers, whereas French has une fleur bleue (feminine singular) and cinq fleurs bleues (feminine plural). Perhaps the Saxons were thumbing their noses at the French-speaking Normans who were the last to successfully invade the sceptered isle (the Normans themselves began as Norsemen, ceded a coastal province to stop their raids on Paris upriver). English also left behind the second-person singular pronouns and verb forms; thou, thee, thy, and thine have passed beyond old-fashioned to archaic. French retains the familiar tu for intimate conversations with a spouse or with God.
Most English verbs require only five permutations to create every person, tense, and mood, with the help of a mere handful of helper verbs, also with limited permutations. For example, the verb to see can appear as see, sees, saw, seen, and seeing. In French, the equivalent verb, voir, has five different forms for the present tense, another five for the present subjunctive, five more each for the simple past and future, and three for the imperative. Yikes! My French dictionary (published in France) has 27 pages of a table, presented sideways in small type, that spells out every one of the multiple forms of verbs regular and irregular in four different conjugations. The same information for English verbs, a simple alphabetical list that includes every form for every irregular verb, fills only four pages in full-size type. The phrasal infinitive in English is particularly neat; the infinitive form is identical to the verb stem, which simplifies many derivations, including future, subjunctive, and imperative.
Finally, English let go of many plural forms inherited from various of its parents; the plural schoen became shoes, although the -en plural ending survived for men, women, and children, among other very old words. (Speaking of very old words, many of the world’s languages have a word for mother that includes the phoneme ma. Desert-born Arabic, however, uses umm for mother and reserves the nurturing ma as the word for water.)
All these changes simplified the English language. Speakers and writers of English didn’t have to worry about the gender of sexless objects and concepts. They didn’t have to parse every sentence as they formed it to make sure all the nouns were in the correct case; they only had to put them in the correct order. They had only one verb conjugation, irregular verbs notwithstanding, and many fewer forms to wade through. They didn’t have to match adjectives to their nouns in number or gender (which gives English a propensity for dangling participles, but that’s another rant).
These simplifications helped make it easy for English to embrace new words. There was no need for an authority to assign a gender (what gender is blog?), no worry about adapting case or tense inflections (blog, blogs, blogged, and blogging cover all the bases), no problem with making it plural. (For most nouns, just add s; if that looks odd, try es. Do not use ’s, or I’ll smack you down.) English accepted words from Arabic (algebra, safari) and Malay (amok, kapok), Japanese (origami, sushi) and Tibetan (lama), Hawaiian (lanai, lei) and Hindi (veranda) with equal ease. There are more words in the English lexicon than in any other language, and the total increases daily as we invent new words for new things and new processes (photocopy, Internet, and website come to mind).
However, the diverse provenance of this vast vocabulary is reflected in the wide diversity of spelling rules that shaped the words in their native tongues. Also at work are different styles of transliteration for words from languages with different alphabets or no alphabet at all. (For instance, Peking became Beijing and Mao Tse-tung became Mao Ze-dong when the system for transliterating Chinese changed.) English spelling has no overriding logic, no simple set of universally applicable rules. The spelling of old English words evolved over centuries and only began to be codified after the invention of the printing press spurred the production and dissemination of written works at a pace impossible for hand copying. The words borrowed and adapted from Latin had the benefit of standardization by generations of scholars and clerics, but borrowings from the Romance languages were less straightforward.
The English words for food animals are mainly of Anglo-Saxon origin: cow, pig, calf, deer. But the words for the meat of these animals are often of French origin, their spelling Anglicized: beef, pork, veal, and venison. This dichotomy is a potent reminder of who could afford to eat meat after the Norman invasion. Embarrass has two r’s because that’s how the French decided to spell the Portuguese word embaraçar (baraça, by the way, means noose). Arabic words involve transliteration from an alphabet that has several versions of d and h and awards the glottal stop its own letter (the hamza) but dispenses with those pesky vowels, which it reduces to optional diacritical marks. (The glottal stop is what you do with your throat if you try to say “a apple” without interposing an n. In other words, English purposely avoids it.)
There have been attempts to derive rules, but they all have loopholes. Everyone remembers “i before e except after c,” but then we have weird and heir, among others. The suffix -ize is used to create verbs in American English (sanitize, verbalize), but not every word that ends with that sound is spelled with a z: surprise and advise are just two examples. Britons spell most such words -ise (summarise, memorise) but have to remember the exception prize.
Spelling is a talent. Without it, you have to memorize every single word added to your vocabulary, which usually has mixed results. (At least we don’t have to remember gender and declension and multiple conjugations too.) The talent for spelling is a form of eidetic memory, the ability to make and retain very detailed mental images. A person with this ability doesn’t have to remember exactly how to spell curious; he has a picture of the word in his head against which to compare the word he writes on the paper. If the pictures don’t match, an alarm goes off, and he’ll fiddle with the written word until it jibes with the mental image.
If you weren’t fortunate enough to be born with eidetic memory, don’t despair and don’t beat yourself up. The ability to spell has nothing to do with intelligence. Extremely bright people can be terrible spellers, making everyday errors such as tommorow, surprize, and seperate. (Word is programmed to outright fix all three of these without a by-your-leave, that’s how common these errors are.) With hard work and sheer determination, a person might memorize as many as a hundred thousand words, but not everyone’s willing to make that effort, especially now that Spellcheck can rescue the hapless. However, the effort to turn on the spelling check feature of your word-processing program should be considered an absolute minimum. Mine is always on. Most of the time it has very little to do; I am one of the lucky ones with an eidetic memory. When I am writing fiction, however, and see squiggly red lines on the screen, I know I’ve been especially inventive—it’s a good thing. Use the spelling checker! It won’t take long and can spare your reader paralyzing confusion and spare you embarrassment (getting caught in a noose).
One major caveat: the program will only tell you if the word you’ve chosen is misspelled. It won’t tell you if you’ve chosen or correctly spelled the wrong word; it can’t. The title of this article contains two misspellings, only one of which (mispellers) upsets the spelling checker. Untie is a misspelling of Unite that happens to be a correctly spelled word, so the program won’t flag it; you have to proofread. See Crotchets articles 1 (Who’s To Blame?) and 4 (Eat Here, We Have Heavy-Metal Windows!) for cautionary examples of failure to use a dictionary to check meaning as well as spelling and failure to proofread.
This is article 7 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The Novelty Wears Off
I’m not sure when it started: maybe the ’70s, maybe the ’80s. I do remember objecting the first time a broadcast television program promised me an “all-new episode!” In a matter of weeks this ridiculous phrase had spread like the measles to spot the other networks (all three of them; ah, the bad old days). Now no premiering episode is ever dissed as being anything less than all-new. Simple new simply won’t do anymore, has been completely cheapened and corrupted.
Of course it’s all-new, if it’s indeed new at all. There is no such thing as a partly new episode, I argued. I perceived no difference between a new episode and an all-new episode, putting this monstrosity in the Department of Redundancy Department category of nonsense.
As it turns out, I was wrong. There is indeed such a thing as a partly new episode in the universe of network television programs.
Successful shows that enjoy a long life, several seasons or several years, occasionally run out of steam. Ideas dry up, the pile of scripts dwindles to a few dogs, the actors want some time off. One solution is to create a portmanteau or retrospective episode, wherein the characters review past events. The (usually very thin) story line generally involves as few of the cast as possible and intersperses a minute or two of acting/dialogue with clips from previous episodes. Voilà, a partly new episode.
I have conceded that all-new is not necessarily redundant in this context. However, I still have a beef, because these partly new episodes are advertised as all-new. No fair, guys! We demand truth in advertising! Portmanteau shows should be labeled as such, to save us all the trouble of watching or recording cobbled-together tidbits from earlier shows. Don’t promise us steak and serve hot dogs. You don’t have to admit it’s only partly new. But you must omit all and describe it accurately as simply a new episode, or the Nitpickers’ Guild will be on your case.
As an aside, let me point out that all-new must be hyphenated whether it precedes or follows the noun. In this phrase, all is being used adverbially; compare with the obvious adverb partly in partly new. The rule is that adverbs that end in -ly are never hyphenated to the adjectives they modify, because their grammatical function is clear, but those that do not end in -ly usually should be hyphenated to prevent misreading. Here, all must be hyphenated so that it won’t be read as either a collective noun (I gave it my all) or as an adjective (we danced all night): All of this is new = This is all new (noun, no hyphen), versus This thing is entirely new = This is all-new. I don’t believe I have ever seen all-new with a hyphen on my TV screen. This does not surprise me.
This is article 6 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Of course it’s all-new, if it’s indeed new at all. There is no such thing as a partly new episode, I argued. I perceived no difference between a new episode and an all-new episode, putting this monstrosity in the Department of Redundancy Department category of nonsense.
As it turns out, I was wrong. There is indeed such a thing as a partly new episode in the universe of network television programs.
Successful shows that enjoy a long life, several seasons or several years, occasionally run out of steam. Ideas dry up, the pile of scripts dwindles to a few dogs, the actors want some time off. One solution is to create a portmanteau or retrospective episode, wherein the characters review past events. The (usually very thin) story line generally involves as few of the cast as possible and intersperses a minute or two of acting/dialogue with clips from previous episodes. Voilà, a partly new episode.
I have conceded that all-new is not necessarily redundant in this context. However, I still have a beef, because these partly new episodes are advertised as all-new. No fair, guys! We demand truth in advertising! Portmanteau shows should be labeled as such, to save us all the trouble of watching or recording cobbled-together tidbits from earlier shows. Don’t promise us steak and serve hot dogs. You don’t have to admit it’s only partly new. But you must omit all and describe it accurately as simply a new episode, or the Nitpickers’ Guild will be on your case.
As an aside, let me point out that all-new must be hyphenated whether it precedes or follows the noun. In this phrase, all is being used adverbially; compare with the obvious adverb partly in partly new. The rule is that adverbs that end in -ly are never hyphenated to the adjectives they modify, because their grammatical function is clear, but those that do not end in -ly usually should be hyphenated to prevent misreading. Here, all must be hyphenated so that it won’t be read as either a collective noun (I gave it my all) or as an adjective (we danced all night): All of this is new = This is all new (noun, no hyphen), versus This thing is entirely new = This is all-new. I don’t believe I have ever seen all-new with a hyphen on my TV screen. This does not surprise me.
This is article 6 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Big Little Problem
Words expressing size or quality are always relative. How big is big? How ripe is ripe? How quiet is quiet? In determining the applicability of any descriptive term, we must rely on ranges and averages as much as definitions. Room temperature might range from about 30 to about 90 degrees depending on the kind of room (tent? stone? wattle and daub?), the location (desert? rain forest?), and the season (summer? winter? monsoon?). Current standards of heating and cooling might allow us to define average room temperature as 70 degrees, but 200 years ago it was probably closer to 55 degrees, making the maxim that wine should be served at room temperature a conundrum.
So there is leeway in defining terms that express size or quality, and we acknowledge the absurdity of juxtapositions such as jumbo shrimp. But lately I have been noticing absurdities created by an apparent unwillingness to pick just one term.
I recently purchased onions at the supermarket. Putting them away at home, I paused to read the sticker that carried the PLU code and discovered that I had purchased “Large medium yellow onions.” Huh? Are they large, or are they medium? I will not consider the possibility that medium is referring to the shade of yellow. For one thing, there’s no hyphen. Surely the growers of all people ought to be able to establish sensible standards, whether by size or weight, diameter or ounces. Most disturbing, however, was that this sticker was attached to onions that I had chosen as being on the small side, i.e., smaller than average, i.e., neither large nor medium. The bin was labeled “Loose onions,” but my receipt had “Onions yellow sm.” Ah hah!
Is the size classification of yellow onions so exact that we need a subcategory poised between large and medium? I doubt it, especially when the produce in question didn’t belong in either category. If “large medium” is being applied to smaller-than-average specimens, can we look forward to buying onions classified as jumbo, colossal, and gigantic? I fear this is some kind of marketing ploy, although the purpose escapes me.
A second absurdity came from a different sort of aberrant thought process. A television ad for a fast-food place (let’s not dignify it as a restaurant) ballyhooed their sundaes, served with “warm hot fudge.” Huh? Is it warm, or is it hot? Actually, I think I have a handle on this one. The person who committed this was seeing hot fudge as a unit, the specific name of a specific thing, a fudgy sauce, its temperature irrelevant. Either the eatery didn’t plan to keep the stuff really hot (I don’t eat at such places partly because the food is never hot enough to please me), or the writer knew from experience that fudge sauce cools off very quickly once in contact with ice cream. Either way, he didn’t want to misrepresent the dish that customers would receive, and so he opted for warm, apparently not caring that the result was absurd, joined in that indifference by the corporate types who okayed this inane language.
As long as it’s heated above room temperature (vide supra), it’s hot fudge sauce. If you don’t heat it at all, it’s simply fudge sauce, and it won’t be a nice contrast for your ice cream. Likewise, if it’s bigger than medium, it’s large; and if it’s smaller than large, it’s medium. Just pick one, you vacillating (oxy)morons!
This is article 5 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
So there is leeway in defining terms that express size or quality, and we acknowledge the absurdity of juxtapositions such as jumbo shrimp. But lately I have been noticing absurdities created by an apparent unwillingness to pick just one term.
I recently purchased onions at the supermarket. Putting them away at home, I paused to read the sticker that carried the PLU code and discovered that I had purchased “Large medium yellow onions.” Huh? Are they large, or are they medium? I will not consider the possibility that medium is referring to the shade of yellow. For one thing, there’s no hyphen. Surely the growers of all people ought to be able to establish sensible standards, whether by size or weight, diameter or ounces. Most disturbing, however, was that this sticker was attached to onions that I had chosen as being on the small side, i.e., smaller than average, i.e., neither large nor medium. The bin was labeled “Loose onions,” but my receipt had “Onions yellow sm.” Ah hah!
Is the size classification of yellow onions so exact that we need a subcategory poised between large and medium? I doubt it, especially when the produce in question didn’t belong in either category. If “large medium” is being applied to smaller-than-average specimens, can we look forward to buying onions classified as jumbo, colossal, and gigantic? I fear this is some kind of marketing ploy, although the purpose escapes me.
A second absurdity came from a different sort of aberrant thought process. A television ad for a fast-food place (let’s not dignify it as a restaurant) ballyhooed their sundaes, served with “warm hot fudge.” Huh? Is it warm, or is it hot? Actually, I think I have a handle on this one. The person who committed this was seeing hot fudge as a unit, the specific name of a specific thing, a fudgy sauce, its temperature irrelevant. Either the eatery didn’t plan to keep the stuff really hot (I don’t eat at such places partly because the food is never hot enough to please me), or the writer knew from experience that fudge sauce cools off very quickly once in contact with ice cream. Either way, he didn’t want to misrepresent the dish that customers would receive, and so he opted for warm, apparently not caring that the result was absurd, joined in that indifference by the corporate types who okayed this inane language.
As long as it’s heated above room temperature (vide supra), it’s hot fudge sauce. If you don’t heat it at all, it’s simply fudge sauce, and it won’t be a nice contrast for your ice cream. Likewise, if it’s bigger than medium, it’s large; and if it’s smaller than large, it’s medium. Just pick one, you vacillating (oxy)morons!
P.S. Okay, there is now (six months later) a red onion labeled Jumbo sitting in my onion basket. There were no "Small" or "Medium" red onions to compare it with. It is a good size, but not big enough to justify the hyperbole of jumbo versus simple large for something that tends to be on the big side anyway. The price was a bit more than usual. These are disturbing omens.
This is article 5 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Eat Here, We Have Heavy-Metal Windows!
The errors that occur in published material extend well beyond spelling and punctuation, although those are the most common. The fact that a firm or business hires professionals to create its ads or news releases or whatever is no guarantee that the result will be error-free and effective.
A fine example of PR myopia and carelessness appeared in a recent issue of a tabloid-sized advertising publication called The Merchandiser. Under the banner head “Featured Restaurant” appears a half-page ad for a newly opened place in downtown Frederick, Md. There is a four-color photograph of an unidentifiable food construct (it might be caviar atop a slice of cheddar cheese atop a very thin cracker) balanced on the back of a spoon. Beneath that are six short paragraphs in a very readable sans serif typeface, followed by the hours of operation, address, phone number, and website. Despite the oddity of the food image, the ad gives a good impression—until you read it.
Let’s start with two ludicrous errors in word choice, both in the homophone category. In paragraph three we are told that the restaurant’s Main Dining Room (their capitals) is “awash in a palate of amber and burnt rose.” Burnt anything offends my palate; the confusion of palate with palette offends my sensibilities. Then, in paragraph five, we learn that there is a “vintage palladium window overlooking Market Street.” When did they begin making windows out of a metal related to platinum? Such a window would weigh a ton and cost a fortune and not be at all transparent. A Palladian window, on the other hand, would look very handsome. To make matters worse, the sentence in which this imbecility appears is a grammatical mess.
Who made these errors? Who wrote this copy? I can only speculate and deduce. I was told by someone associated with the restaurant that they work with a PR firm. Perhaps there was a meeting at which the client requested that the ad mention the colors of the main dining room; the client may even have specified that the palette was amber and burnt rose, and the error here is entirely the copywriter’s. If the client prepared the copy and actually had the word palate written down, the PR firm should have caught the error; that is part of their job. Regardless of whether they made the error or failed to catch it, this howler is a blot on their reputation.
The confusion between palladium and Palladian is on another level entirely. I can envision several possible scenarios, all of which involve Spellcheck. It’s a certainty that the client knew what a Palladian window is, and the fault here belongs solely to the PR firm. Perhaps the client wrote Palladian but misspelled it; perhaps the copywriter mistyped it into the computer; or perhaps the client said Palladian and the copywriter heard it wrong or wrote the unfamiliar word down phonetically. My Spellcheck program offers both Palladian and palladium as alternatives for a likely misspelling, and I see the copywriter picking one without bothering to look it up even though he obviously didn’t know the meaning of either. For shame! May the shade of Andrea Palladio haunt you! (If he did know the meaning and used palladium anyway, his ignorance extends well beyond language.)
Now we come to the biggest problem with this ad. It has nothing to do with grammar, word choice, or punctuation, but it is something a good editor would have queried. The six paragraphs of text in this half-page ad for a restaurant tell us a great deal about the nineteenth-century brownstone that houses it, the décor and ambience of its various rooms, and its location in Frederick’s historic district. Oddly, only half a sentence mentions the food served in this marvelous edifice, and that only vaguely. To quote every word of it, we can look forward to “seasonal entrées” that “showcase classic flavor combinations prepared with fresh, local ingredients.”
So what kind of cuisine does this restaurant offer? New American? Classic French? Thai? The restaurant’s name, a shortening of the executive chef’s last name, isn’t much of a clue. His name is Italian; do we assume the cuisine is Italian? Turns out the place espouses a food philosophy called locavorism—that’s vor as in omnivore and loca as in local, not as in crazy. Call me crazy, but I believe most people debating where to go for dinner don’t choose a place because the architecture is exceptional. Some might be moved to try this one simply because it’s new and sounds elegant. But most people decide where to eat based on the kind of food that might be offered, and they have been given no useful information. This fundamental oversight is a fatal flaw.
This PR firm has produced an ad that doesn’t tell us the most important thing about the business being advertised and uses an unappetizing image to boot. (“What is that? Caviar on cheddar? Yecch!”) The promise of seasonal entrées, classic flavor combinations, and fresh ingredients is not very enticing. You expect that much from any fine restaurant. Good advertising sells the sizzle. This ad isn’t even selling the steak. It’s telling us all about the walls. Is the cuisine less appealing than the décor? Isn't the locavorism philosophy worth one paragraph out of six?
The client’s advertising budget has been ill-spent on an ad that contains not one but two laughable errors and will not entice nearly as many people as a well-conceived, well-written, and well-imaged one would have done. If this were my business, I’d probably be looking for a new PR firm. I would also make a point of proofreading all copy before giving it my approval to avoid embarrassment in the future.
This is article 4 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
A fine example of PR myopia and carelessness appeared in a recent issue of a tabloid-sized advertising publication called The Merchandiser. Under the banner head “Featured Restaurant” appears a half-page ad for a newly opened place in downtown Frederick, Md. There is a four-color photograph of an unidentifiable food construct (it might be caviar atop a slice of cheddar cheese atop a very thin cracker) balanced on the back of a spoon. Beneath that are six short paragraphs in a very readable sans serif typeface, followed by the hours of operation, address, phone number, and website. Despite the oddity of the food image, the ad gives a good impression—until you read it.
Let’s start with two ludicrous errors in word choice, both in the homophone category. In paragraph three we are told that the restaurant’s Main Dining Room (their capitals) is “awash in a palate of amber and burnt rose.” Burnt anything offends my palate; the confusion of palate with palette offends my sensibilities. Then, in paragraph five, we learn that there is a “vintage palladium window overlooking Market Street.” When did they begin making windows out of a metal related to platinum? Such a window would weigh a ton and cost a fortune and not be at all transparent. A Palladian window, on the other hand, would look very handsome. To make matters worse, the sentence in which this imbecility appears is a grammatical mess.
Who made these errors? Who wrote this copy? I can only speculate and deduce. I was told by someone associated with the restaurant that they work with a PR firm. Perhaps there was a meeting at which the client requested that the ad mention the colors of the main dining room; the client may even have specified that the palette was amber and burnt rose, and the error here is entirely the copywriter’s. If the client prepared the copy and actually had the word palate written down, the PR firm should have caught the error; that is part of their job. Regardless of whether they made the error or failed to catch it, this howler is a blot on their reputation.
The confusion between palladium and Palladian is on another level entirely. I can envision several possible scenarios, all of which involve Spellcheck. It’s a certainty that the client knew what a Palladian window is, and the fault here belongs solely to the PR firm. Perhaps the client wrote Palladian but misspelled it; perhaps the copywriter mistyped it into the computer; or perhaps the client said Palladian and the copywriter heard it wrong or wrote the unfamiliar word down phonetically. My Spellcheck program offers both Palladian and palladium as alternatives for a likely misspelling, and I see the copywriter picking one without bothering to look it up even though he obviously didn’t know the meaning of either. For shame! May the shade of Andrea Palladio haunt you! (If he did know the meaning and used palladium anyway, his ignorance extends well beyond language.)
Now we come to the biggest problem with this ad. It has nothing to do with grammar, word choice, or punctuation, but it is something a good editor would have queried. The six paragraphs of text in this half-page ad for a restaurant tell us a great deal about the nineteenth-century brownstone that houses it, the décor and ambience of its various rooms, and its location in Frederick’s historic district. Oddly, only half a sentence mentions the food served in this marvelous edifice, and that only vaguely. To quote every word of it, we can look forward to “seasonal entrées” that “showcase classic flavor combinations prepared with fresh, local ingredients.”
So what kind of cuisine does this restaurant offer? New American? Classic French? Thai? The restaurant’s name, a shortening of the executive chef’s last name, isn’t much of a clue. His name is Italian; do we assume the cuisine is Italian? Turns out the place espouses a food philosophy called locavorism—that’s vor as in omnivore and loca as in local, not as in crazy. Call me crazy, but I believe most people debating where to go for dinner don’t choose a place because the architecture is exceptional. Some might be moved to try this one simply because it’s new and sounds elegant. But most people decide where to eat based on the kind of food that might be offered, and they have been given no useful information. This fundamental oversight is a fatal flaw.
This PR firm has produced an ad that doesn’t tell us the most important thing about the business being advertised and uses an unappetizing image to boot. (“What is that? Caviar on cheddar? Yecch!”) The promise of seasonal entrées, classic flavor combinations, and fresh ingredients is not very enticing. You expect that much from any fine restaurant. Good advertising sells the sizzle. This ad isn’t even selling the steak. It’s telling us all about the walls. Is the cuisine less appealing than the décor? Isn't the locavorism philosophy worth one paragraph out of six?
The client’s advertising budget has been ill-spent on an ad that contains not one but two laughable errors and will not entice nearly as many people as a well-conceived, well-written, and well-imaged one would have done. If this were my business, I’d probably be looking for a new PR firm. I would also make a point of proofreading all copy before giving it my approval to avoid embarrassment in the future.
This is article 4 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Sunday, January 11, 2009
That Would Be Wrong
I love game shows, especially the quiz variety. Jeopardy, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, and Weakest Link are my favorites. But a few years ago, I began to notice a disturbing trend.
My earliest memory of it is the appearance of Danny Bonaduce on Millionaire and Weakest Link. The phrase “That would be” preceded his every answer, delivered very smugly. After that I realized many contestants were prefixing their answers with this phrase, and I’ve had enough of this nonsense. I will explain my disgruntlement for all of you (the majority, I suspect) who haven’t a clue what’s distressing me.
It all has to do with the subjunctive. “The what?” I hear you say. English verbs can be expressed in any of several moods: indicative, interrogative, exclamatory, imperative, and subjunctive. Indicative is simple action: “I ate the donut.” Interrogative asks a question: “Did I eat the donut?” Exclamatory makes a point: “I ate the donut!” Imperative is the form for command: “Eat the donut!” And the subjunctive is used to express the conditional: “I would eat the donut” says you haven’t but you want to; perhaps it hasn’t been offered or you daren’t risk the calories. Statements in the subjunctive often contain or at least imply an if or a but: “I would eat the donut, but it looks like someone dropped it” clearly states you’re not going to even though you’d really like a donut. The person who sighs “Would that I could!” reveals through use of a double subjunctive that he won’t even consider trying.
Therefore, to preface an answer with “That would be” implies that, for some reason, it’s not going to be the right answer. “That would be C, Regis,” begs the question, Except for what? The answer would be C if the Earth’s magnetic poles reversed? If the universe began spinning backwards? Under what conditions that don’t already exist would the answer be C?
But the speaker is implying no such thing by use of this phrase. It’s simply superfluous words, a polysyllabic emptiness akin to “you know” and other hot air-isms. On a show such as Weakest Link, it’s also an unforgivable waste of precious seconds. The fact that it’s a dead wrong use of the subjunctive is lost on these people but a great annoyance to me.
If the answer is C, just say, “The answer is C, Regis.” That would be the correct thing to do.
It’s actually odd that this prevalent error involves the use of the subjunctive rather than failure to use it. Many people don’t recognize when a subjunctive verb is called for, as in “It’s important that you be on time.” The subjunctive, like the imperative, borrows the infinitive form of the verb, and thus the form is often the same for all persons: I, you, he, we, you, and they must all be on time. The subjunctive isn’t always obviously different from the indicative except with to be. It’s not uncommon to see a construction such as “It’s important that you are on time,” but because the action does not actually occur—the person has not gone or arrived anywhere, on time or otherwise—the indicative are is incorrect.
Don’t be (negative imperative) in a bad mood when choosing a verb form. Consider (imperative) whether the action has occurred or is off in some hazy future; if you only want it to happen, use the subjunctive. Will you be (interrogative) more attentive to your moods now? I should hope so (exclamatory subjunctive)!
This is article 3 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
My earliest memory of it is the appearance of Danny Bonaduce on Millionaire and Weakest Link. The phrase “That would be” preceded his every answer, delivered very smugly. After that I realized many contestants were prefixing their answers with this phrase, and I’ve had enough of this nonsense. I will explain my disgruntlement for all of you (the majority, I suspect) who haven’t a clue what’s distressing me.
It all has to do with the subjunctive. “The what?” I hear you say. English verbs can be expressed in any of several moods: indicative, interrogative, exclamatory, imperative, and subjunctive. Indicative is simple action: “I ate the donut.” Interrogative asks a question: “Did I eat the donut?” Exclamatory makes a point: “I ate the donut!” Imperative is the form for command: “Eat the donut!” And the subjunctive is used to express the conditional: “I would eat the donut” says you haven’t but you want to; perhaps it hasn’t been offered or you daren’t risk the calories. Statements in the subjunctive often contain or at least imply an if or a but: “I would eat the donut, but it looks like someone dropped it” clearly states you’re not going to even though you’d really like a donut. The person who sighs “Would that I could!” reveals through use of a double subjunctive that he won’t even consider trying.
Therefore, to preface an answer with “That would be” implies that, for some reason, it’s not going to be the right answer. “That would be C, Regis,” begs the question, Except for what? The answer would be C if the Earth’s magnetic poles reversed? If the universe began spinning backwards? Under what conditions that don’t already exist would the answer be C?
But the speaker is implying no such thing by use of this phrase. It’s simply superfluous words, a polysyllabic emptiness akin to “you know” and other hot air-isms. On a show such as Weakest Link, it’s also an unforgivable waste of precious seconds. The fact that it’s a dead wrong use of the subjunctive is lost on these people but a great annoyance to me.
If the answer is C, just say, “The answer is C, Regis.” That would be the correct thing to do.
It’s actually odd that this prevalent error involves the use of the subjunctive rather than failure to use it. Many people don’t recognize when a subjunctive verb is called for, as in “It’s important that you be on time.” The subjunctive, like the imperative, borrows the infinitive form of the verb, and thus the form is often the same for all persons: I, you, he, we, you, and they must all be on time. The subjunctive isn’t always obviously different from the indicative except with to be. It’s not uncommon to see a construction such as “It’s important that you are on time,” but because the action does not actually occur—the person has not gone or arrived anywhere, on time or otherwise—the indicative are is incorrect.
Don’t be (negative imperative) in a bad mood when choosing a verb form. Consider (imperative) whether the action has occurred or is off in some hazy future; if you only want it to happen, use the subjunctive. Will you be (interrogative) more attentive to your moods now? I should hope so (exclamatory subjunctive)!
This is article 3 in a continuing series. © 2009 Christine C. Janson
Monday, January 5, 2009
Cn U Rd Ths Msj?
After face-to-face conversation, messages seem to be the most prevalent form of communication between individuals today. Instant messaging, text messaging, chat rooms, even voice mail and e-mail—all are characterized by brevity. And to avoid carpal tunnel and texter’s thumb, the latest ailments attributable to technology, message writers are inventing more and more abbreviations and acronyms, and capitals are being guillotined.
c u 2nite. Luv ya. LOL. IMHO. OMG! The list gets longer every week. Communication doesn’t involve words so much as mnemonics for them. These modern technoglyphics are very useful and kind of fun, unless you’re an old fuddydud and can’t wring meaning out of BFF. But what happens when texters sit down to write a formal communication? Do the mnemonics morph back into real words?
The teenager who gets with his girlfriend by pager or busily texts OMG squeals to her BFFs all day long may have a problem when the teacher demands an essay written on paper in the classroom or a report prepared at home on paper or computer. Will he correctly translate c u 2nite into See you tonight? Will she remember how to spell love? Will they produce half-breed monsters—See you tonite or Luv you? What happens when they compose blogs? Will they be so replete with technoglyphic shorthand they become incomprehensible or even just unreadable?
Spelling has always been the bugbear of the English language. Throughout its history, the way words were spelled tended to be rather freeform and individual. The spread of education to the emergent middle class vastly increased the number of people writing and reading things and occasioned the appearance of the first dictionaries of English in the eighteenth century, to help the writers be comprehensible to the readers. Two hundred years of standardization followed, giving us the written English of today. Now the trend to brevity threatens to turn English into a bifurcated language, like Arabic.
Arabic exists as multiple spoken dialects, which differ greatly from region to region, and as a formal written language, which is strictly construed and not very flexible. A Moroccan and an Egyptian would have trouble understanding each other’s speech, but they can read each other’s newspaper. In the time of the caliphs who ruled from Baghdad, the grammarians were as venerated and rewarded at court as the poets, and they created a logical structure for formal Arabic that shows English up as the mongrel mix it is. Their elegant, punctilious construct makes the spelling of things simple but keeps the written and spoken languages apart as well as making written Arabic straitened and inelastic. (Oddly, written Arabic and textspeak share one characteristic: they both leave out the vowels.)
Because its pedigree is so spotty, English usage is based not on the dicta of long-ago pundits but on consensus: this is how most people have said it or spelled it, so that’s how it’s said or spelled. The lexicon easily accepts new words and new constructions, and there is lots of room for definition and argument. The dictionaries have helped establish standards of usage as well as spelling, but a standard based on consensus can change.
Do we want it to change? Will we stand firm for the standard spelling codified in the nineteenth century? Will we insist that any formal communication—a paper for school, a thank-you note to an aunt, a graphic on the television, a newspaper article—follow the rules laid down a hundred years ago? I for one would find it extremely difficult to wade through more than a few lines of textspeak, and I prefer my spelling old-style, because it’s familiar and it’s what we all agreed to when we signed on for universal literacy.
What then of this first generation of texters and bloggers? Perhaps the IM crowd, like the speakers of Arabic, will develop two distinct languages. One is the textspeak used among specific groups or cliques that imposes brevity and rewards cliché. LOL only means something if everyone knows what it means and is content to mean only that; it leaves no room for interpretation or nuance; there is no music. The other language is the highly malleable, bastard amalgam that is standard English, whose roots include Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Nordic, Amerindian, and Swahili, and the spelling of which reflects the diversity of those roots. Like formal Arabic, formal English is comprehensible to everyone because everyone has learned the same rules; unlike Arabic, even formal English has the ability to accommodate the new effortlessly.
Syntax is best served by grammar, and meaning truly suffers when we don’t put the words together right. Spelling has its place too syntactically, and if I mean too but spell it to, we have a communication breakdown. If I spell it 2, meaning is purely contextual and may have gone right out the window.
Texting and other instant communications rob the English language of its richness and complexity. Evolve your technoglyphics and increase your vocabulary of emoticons and numeral-consonant juxtapositions, if you must. But remember there is a far wider potential audience than your IM buddies, and they may not speak your very limited private lingo. Standard English has its place and serves an important purpose. Let’s keep it going till we can replace it with something better. Like telepathy.
Here’s a glossary for the truly out of touch. Cn U Rd Ths Msj, Can You Read This Message; LOL, laughing out loud; IMHO, in my humble opinion; OMG, oh, my god; BFF, best friend forever; IM, instant messaging.
This is article 2 in a continuing series.
c u 2nite. Luv ya. LOL. IMHO. OMG! The list gets longer every week. Communication doesn’t involve words so much as mnemonics for them. These modern technoglyphics are very useful and kind of fun, unless you’re an old fuddydud and can’t wring meaning out of BFF. But what happens when texters sit down to write a formal communication? Do the mnemonics morph back into real words?
The teenager who gets with his girlfriend by pager or busily texts OMG squeals to her BFFs all day long may have a problem when the teacher demands an essay written on paper in the classroom or a report prepared at home on paper or computer. Will he correctly translate c u 2nite into See you tonight? Will she remember how to spell love? Will they produce half-breed monsters—See you tonite or Luv you? What happens when they compose blogs? Will they be so replete with technoglyphic shorthand they become incomprehensible or even just unreadable?
Spelling has always been the bugbear of the English language. Throughout its history, the way words were spelled tended to be rather freeform and individual. The spread of education to the emergent middle class vastly increased the number of people writing and reading things and occasioned the appearance of the first dictionaries of English in the eighteenth century, to help the writers be comprehensible to the readers. Two hundred years of standardization followed, giving us the written English of today. Now the trend to brevity threatens to turn English into a bifurcated language, like Arabic.
Arabic exists as multiple spoken dialects, which differ greatly from region to region, and as a formal written language, which is strictly construed and not very flexible. A Moroccan and an Egyptian would have trouble understanding each other’s speech, but they can read each other’s newspaper. In the time of the caliphs who ruled from Baghdad, the grammarians were as venerated and rewarded at court as the poets, and they created a logical structure for formal Arabic that shows English up as the mongrel mix it is. Their elegant, punctilious construct makes the spelling of things simple but keeps the written and spoken languages apart as well as making written Arabic straitened and inelastic. (Oddly, written Arabic and textspeak share one characteristic: they both leave out the vowels.)
Because its pedigree is so spotty, English usage is based not on the dicta of long-ago pundits but on consensus: this is how most people have said it or spelled it, so that’s how it’s said or spelled. The lexicon easily accepts new words and new constructions, and there is lots of room for definition and argument. The dictionaries have helped establish standards of usage as well as spelling, but a standard based on consensus can change.
Do we want it to change? Will we stand firm for the standard spelling codified in the nineteenth century? Will we insist that any formal communication—a paper for school, a thank-you note to an aunt, a graphic on the television, a newspaper article—follow the rules laid down a hundred years ago? I for one would find it extremely difficult to wade through more than a few lines of textspeak, and I prefer my spelling old-style, because it’s familiar and it’s what we all agreed to when we signed on for universal literacy.
What then of this first generation of texters and bloggers? Perhaps the IM crowd, like the speakers of Arabic, will develop two distinct languages. One is the textspeak used among specific groups or cliques that imposes brevity and rewards cliché. LOL only means something if everyone knows what it means and is content to mean only that; it leaves no room for interpretation or nuance; there is no music. The other language is the highly malleable, bastard amalgam that is standard English, whose roots include Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Nordic, Amerindian, and Swahili, and the spelling of which reflects the diversity of those roots. Like formal Arabic, formal English is comprehensible to everyone because everyone has learned the same rules; unlike Arabic, even formal English has the ability to accommodate the new effortlessly.
Syntax is best served by grammar, and meaning truly suffers when we don’t put the words together right. Spelling has its place too syntactically, and if I mean too but spell it to, we have a communication breakdown. If I spell it 2, meaning is purely contextual and may have gone right out the window.
Texting and other instant communications rob the English language of its richness and complexity. Evolve your technoglyphics and increase your vocabulary of emoticons and numeral-consonant juxtapositions, if you must. But remember there is a far wider potential audience than your IM buddies, and they may not speak your very limited private lingo. Standard English has its place and serves an important purpose. Let’s keep it going till we can replace it with something better. Like telepathy.
Here’s a glossary for the truly out of touch. Cn U Rd Ths Msj, Can You Read This Message; LOL, laughing out loud; IMHO, in my humble opinion; OMG, oh, my god; BFF, best friend forever; IM, instant messaging.
This is article 2 in a continuing series.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Who's To Blame?
The first installment of Crotchets has to explore the issue of responsibility, or perhaps culpability. Language errors abound in material of all sorts: advertisements in magazines and on TV; menus in restaurants exclusive and chain; newsletters put out by sole proprietors and multitudinous organizations; labels on products from peanuts to Playstations. The question is not just who writes this stuff and makes the errors that make me flinch. No, the question I find myself asking again and again is who gives this stuff the thumbs-up.
How many hands does a piece of copy go through before it's actually printed up and distributed to the public? A major manufacturer devises an ad campaign, or a big retail chain plans a sale event. (Not a sale; a sale event. But I digress.) No doubt an advertising agency or PR firm is involved, is given the task of writing copy and creating images that will please and entice. Perhaps the creative team has a team leader, who no doubt reports to a project manager, who himself answers to a director as well as to the client. Surely the client is given multiple opportunities to see and critique both copy and images, and surely the approval process involves multiple levels, from specific manager to VP for promotion, or whatever her title might be. At least two to four and probably as many as 10 to 20 people look at the material before it is finally approved and sent off for publication. It becomes clear that the responsibility for a stupid error lies on more shoulders than just the perpetrator's.
A culling of recent ads will illustrate my point. In the first sentence of its full-page, four-color ad in a glossy magazine for the Leeds Castle Collection of elegant furniture, Laneventure claims "The mere mention of the word castle congers up images of Henry VIII." Unfortunately, the word congers spoils those images entirely and instead conjures up a picture of writhing eels. It's bad enough that the person who wrote it went with phonetics and didn't bother to check a dictionary. But not a single person involved in the creation of this ad recognized that conjures had been laughably misspelled?? There is a second, less obvious error involving punctuation later in the ad, but the first error has already made me question the quality of the furnishings.
Let's move on to a sale catalog produced by Pier 1 Imports, a catalog presumably mailed out by the millions across the country. There are a few routine errors in punctuation and usage, and then on page 10 we are invited to "marvel at an amazing fete of pricing." Now, I could understand confusion between feet and feat, which are at least pronounced alike (understand, but not forgive). But fete is of French origin and is given the French pronunciation. (There should be a circumflex over the first e, but that's a different problem.) I doubt very much the writer intended a pun, with fete given its actual meaning of festival or party; "a festival of pricing" isn't wordplay of any kind, not even a bad pun. Clearly the writer realized that feet was not correct and could not plumb the dim recesses of memory deeply enough to come up with feat, settling for a simple transposition that would, he assumed, rhyme with Pete, not with pet. This is another example of phonetic spelling without a dictionary check. And again I have to ask: How did this idiotic error escape the notice of everyone responsible for the creation of this catalog?
Please don't tell me someone noticed but didn't speak up, didn't think it was important enough to correct. Please don't tell me politics made it imprudent to point out the error. And please don't tell me no one bothered to actually read the copy once it had been written. I would have to hang my head and heave a sigh so deep it would reach my toes. Ignorance is bad. Indifference is worse.
It's important to note that neither of these examples is the work of uneducated people, or even your average Joe. This is the work of people who are paid to write and should be judged against the highest standards for that reason. Dictionaries and style manuals should be at their elbow and in daily use.
Finally, we have an ad for a small business that appeared in a local advertising publication. At the top of this full-page ad for a health club, in 20-point letters, appears "Give you family the gift of fitness." This wince-inducing error has nothing to do with confusion between homophones or uncertainty about pronoun case. This is an out-and-out mistake, a typo, in letters so big nobody actually looked at them. It's a shame, too, because there isn't a single error in spelling, punctuation, or grammar anywhere else in this ad. The unit modifier "24-hour" is correctly hyphenated; the possessive, both singular and plural, has been used correctly in the information about "Frederick's first kids' fitness center," which is exceedingly rare and even praiseworthy. However, there is a second error. In the map at the bottom showing how to get to this health club, the circled number indicating Route 355 has been confusingly truncated to 35, more evidence of failure to proofread.
No fair blaming the printer or typesetter. As they say in the printing business, "Follow your copy even if it goes out the window." It isn't the printer's job to point out errors; I bet printers get a lot of blank stares or angry glares if they try that. Even if the copy was correct and the typo was the printer's error, it's still the job of those paying for the ad to proofread it before approving it for publication, which obviously didn't happen.
Let us note that none of these risible mistakes would have been questioned by a spelling check program; congers, fete, and you are all correctly spelled (although fete is, to my eye, orthographically incomplete). They are simply not correct in their contexts. It frightens me to think that not one of the people responsible for them knew that, or noticed, or cared.
How many hands does a piece of copy go through before it's actually printed up and distributed to the public? A major manufacturer devises an ad campaign, or a big retail chain plans a sale event. (Not a sale; a sale event. But I digress.) No doubt an advertising agency or PR firm is involved, is given the task of writing copy and creating images that will please and entice. Perhaps the creative team has a team leader, who no doubt reports to a project manager, who himself answers to a director as well as to the client. Surely the client is given multiple opportunities to see and critique both copy and images, and surely the approval process involves multiple levels, from specific manager to VP for promotion, or whatever her title might be. At least two to four and probably as many as 10 to 20 people look at the material before it is finally approved and sent off for publication. It becomes clear that the responsibility for a stupid error lies on more shoulders than just the perpetrator's.
A culling of recent ads will illustrate my point. In the first sentence of its full-page, four-color ad in a glossy magazine for the Leeds Castle Collection of elegant furniture, Laneventure claims "The mere mention of the word castle congers up images of Henry VIII." Unfortunately, the word congers spoils those images entirely and instead conjures up a picture of writhing eels. It's bad enough that the person who wrote it went with phonetics and didn't bother to check a dictionary. But not a single person involved in the creation of this ad recognized that conjures had been laughably misspelled?? There is a second, less obvious error involving punctuation later in the ad, but the first error has already made me question the quality of the furnishings.
Let's move on to a sale catalog produced by Pier 1 Imports, a catalog presumably mailed out by the millions across the country. There are a few routine errors in punctuation and usage, and then on page 10 we are invited to "marvel at an amazing fete of pricing." Now, I could understand confusion between feet and feat, which are at least pronounced alike (understand, but not forgive). But fete is of French origin and is given the French pronunciation. (There should be a circumflex over the first e, but that's a different problem.) I doubt very much the writer intended a pun, with fete given its actual meaning of festival or party; "a festival of pricing" isn't wordplay of any kind, not even a bad pun. Clearly the writer realized that feet was not correct and could not plumb the dim recesses of memory deeply enough to come up with feat, settling for a simple transposition that would, he assumed, rhyme with Pete, not with pet. This is another example of phonetic spelling without a dictionary check. And again I have to ask: How did this idiotic error escape the notice of everyone responsible for the creation of this catalog?
Please don't tell me someone noticed but didn't speak up, didn't think it was important enough to correct. Please don't tell me politics made it imprudent to point out the error. And please don't tell me no one bothered to actually read the copy once it had been written. I would have to hang my head and heave a sigh so deep it would reach my toes. Ignorance is bad. Indifference is worse.
It's important to note that neither of these examples is the work of uneducated people, or even your average Joe. This is the work of people who are paid to write and should be judged against the highest standards for that reason. Dictionaries and style manuals should be at their elbow and in daily use.
Finally, we have an ad for a small business that appeared in a local advertising publication. At the top of this full-page ad for a health club, in 20-point letters, appears "Give you family the gift of fitness." This wince-inducing error has nothing to do with confusion between homophones or uncertainty about pronoun case. This is an out-and-out mistake, a typo, in letters so big nobody actually looked at them. It's a shame, too, because there isn't a single error in spelling, punctuation, or grammar anywhere else in this ad. The unit modifier "24-hour" is correctly hyphenated; the possessive, both singular and plural, has been used correctly in the information about "Frederick's first kids' fitness center," which is exceedingly rare and even praiseworthy. However, there is a second error. In the map at the bottom showing how to get to this health club, the circled number indicating Route 355 has been confusingly truncated to 35, more evidence of failure to proofread.
No fair blaming the printer or typesetter. As they say in the printing business, "Follow your copy even if it goes out the window." It isn't the printer's job to point out errors; I bet printers get a lot of blank stares or angry glares if they try that. Even if the copy was correct and the typo was the printer's error, it's still the job of those paying for the ad to proofread it before approving it for publication, which obviously didn't happen.
Let us note that none of these risible mistakes would have been questioned by a spelling check program; congers, fete, and you are all correctly spelled (although fete is, to my eye, orthographically incomplete). They are simply not correct in their contexts. It frightens me to think that not one of the people responsible for them knew that, or noticed, or cared.
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