Thursday, January 22, 2009

David Sedaris, English Language Mistakes



From his book, "When You are Engulfed in Flames".

January 31
What gets me are the mass-produced mistakes, the ones made at Lawson, for example. A huge, nationwide chain of novenience stores, and this is what's printed on the wrappers of their ready-made sandwiches: "We have sandwiches which you can enjoy different tastes. So you can find your favorite one from our sandwiches. We hope you can choose the best one for yourself."
It's not that horribly off the mark, but still you's think that someone, maybe someone in management, might say, "I've got a cousin who lives in America. What do you say I give him a call and run this by him before we slap it on tens of millions of wrappers?" But no.

This is so true last night I stopped at Subway for a sandwich and the have the serve yourself drink machines. On the machine they had posted a sign that said, "No Refuels". It always amazes me that in this land where electronic dictionaries and access to the web can even be had on your cell phone that mistakes like this go unnoticed.

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