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August 31, 2007
Punctuation Police
Many weblogs become successful because they deal with a narrow area of interest within the web-surfing community. And, for any given niche, there may be several blogs to satisfy readers who share the same enthusiasm. For instance, people who want to learn about radical Islam might visit Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch, MEMRI Blog, or many others; with each site providing a different perspective.
For grammar Nazis of the punctuation type, there's The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. Each post contains a picture of some egregious transgression. Apparently, quotation mark misuse is more of a problem than I realized. As far as I know, I'm not prone to this, but, there are times when I feel that I throw in too many commas, but so far, I haven't been "called" on that by our resident grammar Nazi, Marty. But, who knows, maybe Mazurland has its own, internal niche that needs to be filled by a specialized, resident "Comma Commandant".
August 31, 2007 by Chris | Permalink
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Maybe we can start "The Blog of Greengrocer's Apostrophe's". This would be a blog full of inappropriate uses of apostrophes. (Notice the GGA in the name of the Blog.) They got their name from the oft-seen errors on handmade tags in produce stands, e.g. "Apple's $1.29 lb". I am sensitive to it because I do it all the time while composing posts and have to carefully check for them. For some reason, it's easy for me to avoid the "its-it's" pitfall that befuddles most people. You would'nt think Id've had problem's with that.
Posted by: Marty | Aug 31, 2007 10:02:36 AM
I challenge Marty to a duel, winner-take-all for the title of Official Grammar Pedant of Mazurland! Hopefully, he'll never find out about my effect/affect weakness...
Posted by: Ben | Aug 31, 2007 11:02:18 AM
Update: I see the blog you link has a blogroll of similar, grammar-related blogs. There is already an apostrophe-related one: http://apostrophe-abuse.blogspot.com/. There's even a picture of an actual greengrocer's apostrophe (at a produce stand).
Posted by: Marty | Aug 31, 2007 11:04:54 AM
Ben: I've gotten lazy lately because I've actually had some effect cleaning up these boys' acts. Back in the misty beginnings of Mazurland Blog, I'd fire off an email to Chris or Paul almost immediately after they posted with their list of errors. A large part of it was Chris's refusal to even use a spell checker. Apparently, the earlier version of that crappy Mac browser he uses would not let him use the button features of TypePad's composition interface. So he would just leave that duty to me. Paul, a relatively infrequent poster, had elementary problems with grammar (I/me, who/whom, etc.) And I could actually picture them doing end-zone dances on the rare instances when they'd catch me. On the other hand, I would become quite disturbed when I would find a major error in one of my posts that had gone unnoticed for days by both me and my brothers. They really are a couple of unhelpful lummoxes.
Our unofficial rule on this blog is to make our posts as grammatically good as possible, but not to put too much care into the more casual comments section.
As for affect/effect, there are numerous good explanations. Here's a start: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/affect.html.
Posted by: Marty | Aug 31, 2007 11:15:49 AM
Oh, I know the difference, and have read numerous explanations -- I just have some weird mental block that makes me always forget after I refresh my memory. That link, however, is chock full of grammatical goodness!
Posted by: Ben | Aug 31, 2007 11:55:00 AM
We should make a blog about intentionally misspelled business names.
Sort of like "Roy's Kwik Korner"
(at least he got the apostrophe right)
Posted by: Chris | Aug 31, 2007 6:38:49 PM
Hey, Roy's Kwik Korner is not far from me. I'll have to check it out. Was this a Mazurland endorsement or just an observation?
Posted by: Marysia | Aug 31, 2007 9:38:52 PM
Besides the intentional misspelling, the web site is swarming with quotation marks. I hope their crabs are good.
Posted by: Marty | Aug 31, 2007 10:05:42 PM
Marysia,
I just did a Google search for "Korner" and found their site.
Not an endorsement, but maybe an omen.
You and the family should go there some day and tell us what it's like.
Is it in a bad neighborhood?
Posted by: Chris | Sep 1, 2007 8:32:06 AM
We were just in that area for dinner last week for some crab cakes. Glen Burnie seems to be a blue collar neighborhood. When I worked at Westinghouse, now Northrop, a lot of the workers lived in that area. We'll have to check out Roy's or at least ask around about it. If we do go there we'll have to post a review.
Posted by: Marysia | Sep 1, 2007 11:32:41 AM
