Here is an interesting sentence where the author shows that the words till and 'til are seperate things ('til) representing the word until

Just a little article I found

This is a comedy article on grammar. It is rather amusing.

This image shows a usage error in an advertisement. It's depressing to see the lack of quality control.

Stuff from my digital project

I know this is a little late, but here is some of what I have done for my digital project.

Grammar is....

Lost in translation

So I recently bought a new alarm clock online die to problems with the cell phone alarm (I have to leave the ringer on to have the alarm go off, but people text me at obscene hours and wake me up) and the instructions were incredibly poorly translated. This was not the greatest offence by a long shot however. The clock has AM and PM backwards on the alarm settings, thus, my alarm did not go off this morning, but instead, I woke up at almost noon. Just another example of things being problematic due to a lack of proofreading or quality control. Theres a general attitude of sloppiness that I see everywhere today, and it really grinds my gears.

Millitary Grammar

i was watching a TV show that had a boot camp scene in it, and noticed the soldiers going "SIR YES SIR" This is peculiar construction that in any other circumstances seems ridiculous. You don't see people going around saying "Bob, yes bob." It is a unique form of speech used in the military, and is instantly identifiable. It almost feels as if this construction is there to help differentiate military life from civilian life.

Passive Voice

as a psychology major, I am required to write everything in an "active voice" and avoid the "passive voice". This is something I have had a great deal of difficulty with on occsaision, as there are often phrases that seem to flow better in the passive voice than the active. In addition, I had some confusion as to what constitutes passive voice vs active voice. according to the writing center at the University of South Carolina Chapel Hill, "A passive construction occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence. That is, whoever or whatever is performing the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence. Take a look at this passive rephrasing of a familiar joke:Why was the road crossed by the chicken? "

This is an obvious example of the passive voice, but there are a number of less obvious ways to fall into using the passive voice, especially when writing about scientific research. Here is an example from one of my own papers.

"The research was conducted in a classroom setting"

this sentence does not seem to be stylistically "bad", but under APA style guidelines, this sewntence had to be changed to

"We conducted the research in a classroom study"

Obfuscating Language

I am so tired of seeing obfuscating language on packaging. "33% more!" 33% more of what? It isn't until you look under the little fine print in the asterisked text that you see that it's 33% more than the smaller bottle. Such a great deal. It only costs 33% more... The same goes for EULAs on software. The language is so obfustcating, hardly anybody knows what they are actually agreeing to. While not a purely grammatical issue, it is ridiculous that they are able to hide gems like this in EULAs on the third or fourth page, by which point most people have given up due to the density of the wording of the entire agreement.IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND BY THE BINDING ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER IN THIS SECTION 15, YOU MUST NOTIFY SNEI IN WRITING WITHIN 30 DAYS OF THE DATE THAT YOU ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT. YOUR WRITTEN NOTIFICATION MUST BE MAILED TO 6080 CENTER DRIVE, 10TH FLOOR, LOS ANGELES, CA 90045, ATTN: LEGAL DEPARTMENT/ARBITRATION AND MUST INCLUDE: (1) YOUR NAME, (2) YOUR ADDRESS, (3) YOUR PSN ACCOUNT NUMBER, IF YOU HAVE ONE, AND (4) A CLEAR STATEMENT THAT YOU DO NOT WISH TO RESOLVE DISPUTES WITH ANY SONY ENTITY THROUGH ARBITRATION."This is taken from the SONY PSN agreement, and is far enough in that most people would give up on trying to read this far. It is far from the only example of abusive EULAs that hide behind pages of o

bfuscating language before getting to the important parts.