I asked my Spanish teacher whether “encantado” (“delighted,” as in “delighted to meet you”) was cognate with “enchanted.” He said no, that it was a false cognate.
Tag Archives | Lapsus Linguae
When Duty Whispers Low, “Thou Must”
Shockingly, no one seems to have made the obvious joke yet:
So I will.
The Phantom: Thread or Menace?
Lucifer: Threat or Menace?
From a recent episode of Lucifer:
“Well, what came first? Do angels’ powers shape their personalities, or are your personalities shaped by your powers?”
A related question: do these tv shows hire incompetent script editors, or are incompetent script editors hired by these tv shows?
Apostrophe Fail
Part 1: One of my pet peeves is when people substitute an opening quotation mark for an apostrophe – for example, when they write the abbreviation for 1973 as ‘73 instead of ’73.
This is a phenomenon of the computer age; I don’t recall seeing it when I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, but I see it all the time now. The reason is that it’s a product of auto-correct; in most word-processing programs, if you try to type an apostrophe at the beginning of a word, auto-correct will assume you intended to type an opening quotation mark, and so will change it to an opening quotation mark, and you have to make a conscious effort to change it back.
But as a result, people’s brains have been warped to the point that nowadays, even when auto-correct isn’t involved (for example, when they’re hand-painting a sign), they still substitute an opening quotation mark for an apostrophe.
Goddamn reversed apostrophe
I think the most embarrassing (because most expensive and high-profile) example of the mistake that I’ve seen is in the 1973 posters of Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs flashed up at the 0:26 and 0:42 marks this new movie trailer. It’s particularly ironic because it’s a mistake that wouldn’t have been made in 1973.
Part 2:
Well, that example didn’t wear the “most embarrassing (because most expensive and high-profile) example” crown for long. Right after I wrote the above, I came across a much worse example in the following trailer (at the 2:15 mark), which features a gigantic apostrophe fail in the very title of the goddamn movie:
Embarrassing trailer
Thankfully, this empire of incompetence does not extend everywhere. This poster for the movie was evidently made by people who grasp the difference between apostrophes and quotation marks:
Non-embarrassing poster
Unfortunately, there’s another poster ….
Embarrassing poster
Overheard at the Grocery Store
Conversation at the checkout counter, as “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” plays on the store’s sound system:
CHECKER: Why aren’t they playing Christmas music?
BAGGER: This is from “The Nutcracker.”
CHECKER: Is that a scary movie?
BAGGER: No!!
CHECKER: Oh, it’s a Christmas movie?
BAGGER: Yes! I think it starred Barbie.
This is like one of those stories where the person rescuing you from the vampire, turns out also to be a vampire.
R.I.P. Leonard Cohen
I don’t think anyone’s music has been more important to me over the past two decades than Cohen’s.
Farewell, maestro.