Watch Your Language

When I was a young boy, I remember having weekly spelling tests every Monday with one of our junior school teachers, Mr Strangwood. In order to prep for this weekly test, each Friday we would be issued with a list of five words which we needed to both learn how to spell, and also how to use these words within a sentence. I seem to remember that my dad, when giving me a bath on a Sunday, would test me to make sure I was ready for the Monday morning test.

One Sunday, one of the words was ‘reservoir’. While I could spell it no problem, I struggled to come up with a sentence using the word. Looking back I can’t quite believe that as it would seem so obvious to go for something like ‘the reservoir is filled with water’ or ‘they sail their boats on the reservoir at the weekends’, but at the time it seemed really tough. My dad, bless him, came up with something which I can’t quite remember, but it was a really abstract little sentence – something like ‘the brain is a reservoir of intellect’. You know when you look up a word in the dictionary and find it has several meanings, with the last being the least commonly used? Well whatever the sentence he came up with actually was, it would have been making use of the word’s least-obvious definition, and quite rightly instead of looking very intelligent for my age, Mr Strangwood gave me a very quizzical look the next morning when he saw my sentence.

My dad isn’t the best speller, but this piece wasn’t intended to knock his grasp of English. However, one lesson that my dad taught me was that if you’re unsure of how to spell a word, or what a word means, you look it up. Whenever he was writing reports for his job, he would always have his dictionary to hand. The advent of spell checkers on word processing software has made it easier to avoid terrible literary faux pas, which is why I find it even more unbelievable when I see awful spelling in very public media.

I decided to collect a few examples of poor spelling or grammar in adverts that really irked me with their carelessness, and I’m sure that if you wanted you could append many other examples. In so doing, please note that this is definitely not a ‘flog’, a covert attempt to encourage people to purchase goods or services from the following companies, and hopefully after reading some of them it may encourage you not to. It is merely an attempt to highlight how careless people can be with language; a cultural indictment on our modern, lackadaisical age if you will.

The first was a leaflet dropped through our door advertising a new local pizza delivery company called Pizza Village. It was quite a well-laid out flyer, good imagery and clear. But the spelling was awful. Among the usual suspects, Pizza Village – whose name suggests of course that a hut just doesn’t represent enough pizza anymore – offer some varieties I’ve never seen before. For example, they offer a Hawain, which in losing the extra ‘i’ turns this badly concocted fruit / meat juxtaposition into something that evokes a Constable painting, a pastoral take on the pizza genre but which probably still tastes like a badly concocted fruit / meat culinary juxtaposition. They also offer a Vegetarian Itliano, which really made me laugh – if you’re going to make an attempt to bastardise regional cuisine, at least make an attempt to spell the country of origin correctly. Not happy with the choice of toppings? Well, you can choose from tune, perppers and jelapeno. And if you’re a healthy eater, the salad bar includes crutons. Want to go large? Under meal deals you can have any 2 canned drinks and 2 colslaw. On the same page, just a few centimetres away, you can have colsalw. Tempted?

In fairness to Pizza Village or their graphic designers Hashim Designs, some of these words are a little tough, especially two that are essentially foreign. And at the end of the day, we should encourage local businesses shouldn’t we? Even those ones that peddle cheap stodgy crap.

I had the pleasure of having an estate agent drop a very boring leaflet through my door, advising me that Alan Francis, the agent, had recently sold a house on our estate. ‘Wow,’ I inwardly exclaimed. ‘What an achievement in a buoyant housing market.’ Then, whereas I would normally throw such litter in my recycling bag, I decided to have a read. Alan, bless him, seems to have a bit of a penchant for inverted commas, except that like Joey in one episode of Friends, seems to have a bit of difficulty understanding how best to use them. Poor lamb: under the advantages section, which is supposed to make you immediately ring Alan up and beg him to sell your house for you, he has stated that his company makes use of ’24-hour “internet” advertising’. Now, when I read this, ignoring the obvious fact that the internet doesn’t have a period between 5.30PM and 9.00AM where you simply can’t get hold of anybody, it being essentially an ‘always on’ service, his use of inverted commas to highlight the word internet actually makes me think that he doesn’t have an internet presence at all, and that in fact, when he uses the expression ‘internet’ he means sticking pictures of your house in newsagents’ windows (the tenuous connection to the internet being that the newsagent stocks computer magazines). Further on Alan claims to have a ‘Mayfair office’, which being again similarly picked out in inverted commas implies that he has probably never even been to London but that he knows naïve punters might see this and think his tinpot firm a much larger concern than it clearly is. But most of you, thankfully, won’t have heard of Alan Francis.

So let’s pick a slightly larger concern – Morrisons Cornish Pasty Company, which has a counter in my local town centre, and, if my research serves me well, branches across the country. Every Saturday when we go into town it amazes me how long the queues are at this store, and I feel quite pleased that people are shunning Burger King which is only a few units down in favour of arguably better food. But pleased though I am by this small culinary revolution, I can’t forgive Morrisons for their signage.

My wife, knowing that I am a fickle bastard when it comes to English, mentioned to me about a ‘Save The Apostrophe’ society, which I heartily embrace and it’s companies like Morrisons that should be at the top of this society’s hitlist if it ever decides to set up a militant wing. For above the queues of slavish consumers runs the legend ‘Morrisons Cornish Parties – Makers Of The Worlds Finest Cornish Pasties’. Subtle, I know, but wrong, wrong, wrong not to include the possessive apostrophe when stating – and who can prove or disprove the assertion? – that the best pasties in the world are made by Morrisons. The sign picks out the letters in a bright yellow colour on a royal blue background, and I’m often sorely tempted to buy a sheet of yellow paper, cut out a small apostrophe-shaped piece and glue it between the ‘d’ and ‘s’ of ‘worlds’ and smugly reflect on my small contribution to the correct use of our fine language..

Still, it remains quite a small error and one that will probably have escaped widespread attention. So let’s find a more high profile one.

Britney Spears. Hardly a name that one would associate with outstanding spelling or grammatical abilities, at least not since she sloughed off the wholesome Disney image and opted instead for risqué outfits. But then again, I wouldn’t associate her with perfume either, but release a perfume she has. It’s such an obvious move that I haven’t even bothered to remember the name of this no doubt acrid smell; it’s so clichéd to do this these days, and I’m sure that celebrities aren’t really involved in deciding on topnotes and bottle design, but it has that celebrity’s name and image attached, and therefore it is she who can take the flak for the terrible spelling exhibited on the advertising spots that frame ITV2’s new flagship US import, the highly enjoyable if brattish Entourage.

Whatever this perfume is called, the spots are filled with garish swathes of pink and green with scrolling statements loosely tied to the word ‘entourage’, with a few words whispered over the top, presumably by Britney herself. One of the scrolling statements, which I am pleased to say has been removed from the sponsorship of the new series said ‘Capitvate your entourage’. Capitvate? Surely sponsors of high-profile advertising campaigns for flagship imported programmes aren’t this careless with their spelling? Doesn’t anybody check these things over? And anyway, what does ‘captivate your entourage’ actually really mean?

The aforementioned Mr Strangwood, on his first day as our teacher, stood up in front of us and said ‘Occasionally I will make mistakes with my spelling deliberately, just to see if you’re paying attention,’ which was of course nonsense; people do make mistakes, that’s human nature. But if you believe that adverts are golden opportunities to sell your wares, then at least take a bit of care and pride over your advert and spell things correctly. Surely it’s not much to ask.