Take pictures of examples of spelling and punctuation so horrible that they make me feel a bit sick, and post them on here for other language geeks to gawp at.

And it’s been a while…

This one’s courtesy of the California DMV.

Could it be that I am the first to point out this error? Hard to imagine with 200.000.000 members!

..from a local company advertising on the side of milk bottles.

Technically, there are only two things really wrong with it – inappropriate capitalisation and misplaced speechmarks. But add to that the fact that they have filched their advertising slogan from Carlsberg and half-nicked their name from another ice-cream manufacturer, presumably in the hope that confused and harried mothers will pick up the wrong tub, vaguely remembering that their kids asked for ice cream with men’s names, and you have a tubful of annoying. It had better be good ice cream to get over that little lot.

I have a ton of these stored up on my phone. At some point I’ll get around to posting them.

specifically, the use of the word “compliment,” although it makes limited sense given the context in which it’s being used here. The word “complement” would be more appropriate.

From Wiktionary:
Compliment
and
Complement

It’s not.
I’m very happy this isn’t my tattoo.

but I just heard someone use the word “disencourage”.

Shudder.

Even worse, the chalkboard on the other side of the door spelled it correctly :-p

Found this just today and it can’t wait. :) Setting aside the l33t-sp33k for the time being, how many instances of bad punctuation can you spot? (There’s at least one that may or may not be, if you consider context.) I counted 8 for sure, and two or three more potential ones.

But that’s not all. This is touted as a “babysitting” service with a video-gaming focus. But doesn’t that image in the lower left look like a depiction of a first-person shooting game? (In an office or classroom, no less?) The way I see it at least, most kids of an appropriate age for games featuring handguns will also be of a reasonable age to not need babysitting.

It’s not my intent to rag on this company, but some proofreading would have gone a long way here. It’s been brought up that limited understanding of English can be an issue, but in my experience at least, limited English skills and simple bad writing can usually be readily differentiated.

My pictures will be more ironic that solely to do with misspellings and grammatical errors… I just chose the same goal because I wanted to be part of a group and so I could gawp at others’ pictures (I am one of the other language geeks).

Most of them have been spontaneously clicked with my camera phone, so they’re probably not optimally clear.