Brilliant marketing

I took this photo at my local Giant Eagle the other day. I can't decide if I hope it was an innocent mistake or intentional. Either way, it's awesome.


Not pictured: the pregnancy tests they put on the bottom shelves.

A long sentence for a long absence

For our at-work Halloween celebration, I dressed up as a run-on sentence. It was a total of 191 words long (which, if you're curious, equaled eight yards of ribbon), with many independent clauses.

Wanna bet the t-shirt writer went to U of Michigan?

It's been a long stretch without a post...but I can't resist sharing this article (FYI, Michigan is Ohio State's big football rival, so the title of my post is for all the Buckeye fans out there):
http://shine.yahoo.com/event/fallfashion/grammar-fail-on-old-navys-college-t-shirts-uh-oh-2531551/

On a side note, considering her choice of subject, I am going to choose to believe that the author is either British or chooses to write in the British style--because if not, she has a grammar fail in her article, too. Can you spot it?

"Hundreds of thousands of shirts...have been shipped to stores with the phrase 'Let's Go', sans apostrophe."

In which spellcheck (almost) redeems itself

I'm a believer in first going after the low-hanging fruit, so when I started a recent document editing project, I didn't hesitate to make a first pass using Word's Spelling & Grammar function.

My directive was simply to proof the document and make minor edits to copy based on changes provided by the client, so I clicked "ignore" on the plentiful suggestions to address usage of passive voice. I accepted changes to spelling errors and spacing issues, and studied the context for any identified sentence fragments or other infractions before choosing to ignore most (the majority were items in bulleted lists).

But I nearly chortled in joy when Word suggested that I reconsider the use of the word "impact" as a verb--this is one of my top three copywriting pet peeves, but I've never seen it flagged by Word as an error.

And I really DID chortle when, a few pages later, it suggested that I replace the phrase "step-by-step" with the word "systematic."

And then Word reminded me why I get paid the big bucks: it completely missed that "acronym" was misspelled "acroynm."

Three cheers for another victory of (wo)man over machine!

I like this video...less because of the message than because I think the guy in it is a cutie.