Historicist: Life in Wartime
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
Behind the scenes, we at Torontoist are known to pedantically and tediously debate the use of em dashes—like these—and the proper form of an ellipsis (technically, "…" is more correct than "..." See? Tedious!).
While we're fans of splitting grammatical hairs and clearly make our own share of errors from time to time, it's hardly as embarrassing as this conspicuous mistake printed in student agendas distributed to almost three hundred Toronto schools: as reported by the Star, students in grades 4–6 received the publication, which featured a tip sheet on "Grammer/Punctuation."
Mind you, Toronto students are still inexplicably graduating from post-secondary institutions without knowing the difference between "your" and "you're," but that's another story.
The gaffe is an embarrassment to agenda supplier Premier, which, according to its mission statement, aims "to help educators equip their students with the skills they need to succeed at school, at work and in life." Premier has its own proofreaders, but it took a furious parent—also a professional proofreader—to bring the error to the attention of the school board.
Though some parents are bound to be outraged, we're comfortable in assuming it was just an ironic typo that made it through Premier's normally competent screening process. Still, how did it slip by so many vetting eyes—and the computer's spell checker? OMG LOL, u guyz!
Photo by me and the sysop.
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Isn't it "grammar?"
Maybe you were being ironic or something.
Matty, it's a quote.
In the UK, "grammer" is a type of school. Maybe that caused it not to show up in their spell checker. No excuse, though.
[sic] is always handy in these cases.
That's it Gloria, go [sic]'em!
My personal favorite is this.
How it happens is the hed wasn’t in the copy placed in Quark/InDesign and was typed manually, or was retyped when someone did an orbital nuke to delete styles. Use of all-caps did not help the typist’s ability to self-correct, a task that is exacting and troublesome even for perfectionists.
Why didn’t the spellchecker catch it? Obviously it was typed after spellchecking was done, and/or existed in a different story from the main copy and wasn’t checked. Or the typist didn’t know the difference and added it to the exception dictionary. Or the phone rang just at that moment and they distractedly clicked Ignore.
Incidentally, the Unicode ellipsis character will not necessarily display properly in old browsers, not that we have very much cause to worry about them. (The ellipsis character defeats its own purpose, since you can’t control the spacing between the dots.) Nospace-emdash-nospace simply does not work on the Web, since Web browsers have no concept of H&J and barely know when to break a line.