Sunday, 20 April 2008
The choise is yours
Sent in by my girlfriend, Natalie. After despairing of my pedantry for so long, she now seems to be taking the if-you-can't-beat-them approach.
Anyone for MIX salad?
*UPDATE* Oops, it turns out this wasn't sent to me by my girlfriend after all but my friend and colleague, Paul, who took the picture in St. Pancreas station and sent it to me by MMS. Due to the limitations of my phone I misattributed the source. Tech and social media fans should check out Paul's blog, Blending the Mix.
Labels: exclamation marks, menus, randomised caps, signs, spelling
posted by Gez at 6:10 pm
2 Comments
Thursday, 20 December 2007
Grammar Abuse in signage: part 15
You've probably seen this as everyone in the world reads The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. If you don't, you should. 
I love to hate everything about this sign: the terrible typefaces; the indented first line; the incorrect tense; the misspelt three letter word; the weird hanging quotation mark; and finally the ambiguity. Am I to built my onw taco, or my onw taco bar?
It's up there with the worst sign ever.
Labels: menus, quote me happy, signage, spelling, Typography, wrong word
posted by Gez at 11:28 pm
5 Comments
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Confectioners Tea
Today I found this horror on a drinks menu at a four-star hotel:
Labels: apostrophe abuse, hotels, menus, randomised caps
posted by Paul at 2:09 pm
1 Comments
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
As I Like's It
More gastronomic & linguistic innovation from As You Like It.
Apologies for the poor quality photo; I must have been shaking with contempt when I noticed that their latest menu referred to "Gateaux's & Cakes".
UPDATE: Here's an article discussing the above issue.
Labels: apostrophe abuse, As You Like It, foreign language spelling errors, menus, photos, The List
posted by Tom at 7:55 pm
29 Comments
Friday, 26 October 2007
An Blog Entry by a Irritated Man
Inspired by a trip to a local restaurant, my good lady wife and I now enjoy getting ‘an’ and ‘a’ the wrong way around. This, taken from their menu, is why:
Leaving aside the tautological content of this menu filler (why didn’t they just leave a space there? Which words could possibly add to the enjoyment of a meal apart from ‘Your meal tonight will be served by a wheelchair-bound Margaret Thatcher, who has just 15 minutes left to live. Feel free to kick her up the arse as you see fit and empty the contents of your pickle tray onto her rotting corpse’), just how did they get this so wrong?
They certainly aren’t alone. This appeared in the Guardian’s G2 section a couple of weeks back:
Oh dear.
posted by Dan at 1:22 pm
89 Comments
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
Another menu!
This menu was sent to my phone.
I love getting texts like this, even if they indicate that my girlfriend is having fun in London's cocktail bars while I'm stuck at work. As well as the apostrophe abuse, check out the erratic capitalisations.
Labels: apostrophe abuse, menus, photos, punctuation
posted by Gez at 7:18 pm
0 Comments
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Get Involved
Sometimes our quest to protect grammar requires action, not words. Which is satisfyingly ironic I suppose.
Restaurant menus are not massively verbose tomes. Nor – as the food-snobs among you are doubtless aware – should they ever be.
Whilst dining recently in the comfortable but contrived surroundings of Newcastle 'GastroPub' As You Like It, I felt compelled to take matters into my own hands:
I advise that all GrammarBlog readers and contributors take a red pen along to restaurants in future. Remember to add http://spandg.blogspot.com to your graffiti.
Oh and yes &ndash sadly I hadn't the time nor the inclination to highlight every grammatical and linguistic horror on the menu; one look at the smorgasbord of errors and trite capitalisations in the above photo ought to give you an indication of just how dreadful the whole thing was.
Labels: apostrophe abuse, As You Like It, menus, photos, revolution, The List
posted by Tom at 7:31 pm
4 Comments
Monday, 25 June 2007
French Letters
This is a double-pronged sin. The restaurant, in their smattered employment of French, have been deliberately abstruse so as to seem better, nay classier, than they really are, and then managed to do that wrongly. This brings to mind broadsheet columnists and their incongruous deployment of Latin phrases.
Malmaison, with your 'Wow-factor suites' and ambiguous invite for us to ‘Eat, drink and sleep it’, welcome to The List.
Labels: foreign language spelling errors, Malmaison, menus, The List
posted by Dan at 11:24 am
3 Comments
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