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Sometimes it’s hard to show sarcasm while you’re wearing mittens because you can’t make the proper hand gesture for air quotes. Fortunately, these air quote mittens can help you maintain your hand expressions no matter how cold it is.
Of course, I personally prefer the adorable critter mittens in the Neatoshop.
Grammar.net is holding a contest to determine the Best Grammar Blog of 2011. How many grammar blogs could there be? More than you think …there are 75 different blogs in the running! Although you shouldn’t vote for blogs you haven’t visited, there are links for each entered grammar blog so you can check them out. You might find a regular source of grammar help -or maybe even entertainment! Link -via TYWKIWDBI
I’ve always advocated that you don’t have to be intelligent to have rights, but this idea from Defective Yeti has wondrous, if perverse, appeal. What if you had to prove that you had a grasp of basic grammar before you could log on to the internet? You’ll find a rotation of these at the site, with working buttons that will determine whether you are worthy. Link -via Rue The Day!
You do seek out opportunities to point out the grammatical errors of other people? If so, Stephen Fry holds you in contempt. He argues that (1) the subjective and changing nature of language prevents definitive grammatical forms and (2) you’re a pretentious pedant.
via Nerdcore
Previously on Neatorama:
Grammar Nazi
Punctuation Hero or Vandalizing Grammar Nazi
Don’t let the grammar Nazis get you down! If they’ve corrected you for misusing that for whom, starting a sentence with and, but and however, or gasp – the sin of "verbing" – fight back!
Jan Freeman of Throw Grammar from the Train blog has a nifty post over at Boston about English language rules that even the grammar Nazis got wrong. For example:
The girl that I marry. No, it doesn’t have to be whom I marry. “People that has always been good English,” notes Bryan Garner in Garner’s Modern American Usage, “and it’s a silly fetish to insist that who is the only relative pronoun that can refer to humans.” Choose who if you like, but to claim that using that “makes a person seem less human,” as Mignon Fogarty suggested in a Grammar Girl podcast — that’s just looking for trouble.
Since you asked. It’s totally legit to use since for because, unless it would cause ambiguity. Since has had its causal sense, as well as its temporal sense, from the beginning.
Lynn Rosenthal, a college professor of English, is a stickler for correct grammar. She doesn’t approve of Starbucks’ word usage, and after an argument with a barista, she was forcibly removed from a Starbucks location in New York City:
“I just wanted a multigrain bagel,” Rosenthal told The Post. “I refused to say ‘without butter or cheese.’ When you go to Burger King, you don’t have to list the six things you don’t want.
“Linguistically, it’s stupid, and I’m a stickler for correct English.”
Rosenthal admitted she had run into trouble before for refusing to employ the chain’s stilted lexicon — balking at ordering a “tall” or a “venti” from the menu or specifying “no whip.”
Instead, she insists on making a pest of herself by ordering a “small” or “large” cup of joe.
Link via Geekosystem | Photo by Flickr user tristanf used under Creative Commons license
Chuck and Beans discover what we’ve known here at Neatorama for a long time. This comic was created by by Brian at Shoebox Blog. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
Hannah Estes, a four-year old fourth grader from Coleville, Texas, spotted something designers and thousands of tourists had not for 11 years. She spotted an error on a sign to the Primeval Whirl ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando.
The sign counted down the time to the ride: 5 seconds, 4 seconds, 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 1 seconds.
“I read it out loud, and I’m like, ‘Hey, that doesn’t sound right,” Hannah said. “A singular number can’t be with a plural.”
So she snapped a photo of the sign and wrote the top brass at Disney in California and Florida. The response was “almost immediate,” said her father, Keith Estes.
The company expressed sentiments similar to those of her mother, Terri Estes, who said: “It’s been up for 11 years, and Hannah’s the first to catch and report it. It’s just amazing that it got past the designers, cartoonists and thousands of tourists, and it took a fourth-grader to catch it.”
Disney officials told Hannah they would fix the sign immediately and thanked her for pointing out the error. They also sent her a certificate making her an honorary Imagineer, a special-edition collector’s pin and an Imagineering Field Guide book.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
Colonel Landa has nothing on this guy!
Allie notices bad grammar and lazy typing. One common mistake we see a lot is to make the words “a lot” into one word, but Allie takes this particular mistake in stride. So that we may all enjoy the joke, she illustrated the Alot.
The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.
See the Alot in many different situations at Hyperbole and a Half. Link -via Buzzfeed
“Crash Blossoms” are ambiguous headlines that can be quite funny. They result from the space-saving technique of leaving out articles, conjunctions, and sometimes even verbs.
For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.
My favorite example from the article is “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Link
Crash Blossoms is a blog that collects these headlines for your amusement. Link -via Metafilter
The Economist has an article about how languages can be said to be, comparatively speaking, more or less complex. The grand prize for most complex language goes to one in the Amazon:
With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.
Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Image: NASA
A couple of these are on my pet peeve list; I bet you find a couple that are on yours as well. Enjoy The Oatmeal’s humorous look at some of the most common (and annoying) spelling mistakes!
Stefan Gatward has been wrestling with inner turmoil ever since the Birmingham city council began removing the apostrophes from the city’s signs this January.
Finally, his frustration was too much to bear, and Stefan took it upon himself to fix the signs. But he didn’t stop there …
He will not join the ‘five items or less’ queue at the supermarket, in protest that the sign should read ‘five items or fewer’.
He also gets annoyed when people-neglect the ‘Royal’ in ‘Royal Tunbridge Wells’, and was vexed when he saw a major chain store advertising sales with signs saying ‘until stocks last’ rather than ‘while stocks last’.
‘I fought for the preservation of our heritage and our language but some people seem happy to let that go. I’m not,’ he said.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by coconutnut.
