 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Wayward words fuel her pastime
By ROBERT KING
© St. Petersburg Times, Marianne Finnigan seems like a nice person. She is friendly. She doesn't interrupt when a person is speaking. And she insists she doesn't enjoy pouring salt on slugs or turning gopher tortoises over on their backs so they can't move. It is just that Finnigan enjoys pointing out other people's misspellings and grammatical errors. When she read in the Times that Hernando High School had misspelled the word "millennium" on the diploma covers given to graduates last month, she snickered. And then she wrote the newspaper a letter to say that she collects "pictures and other evidence of gross misspellings and improper grammar." It appears, too, that she has found plenty of examples since moving to Florida last year. "I hit the mother lode," she wrote. Yes, "lode" is the proper usage there. Now, before deciding to run Finnigan out of town for sounding like a know-it-all Yankee, hear her out. "I didn't want to come off as some holier-than-thou prude. Spelling is a gift," said Finnigan, a 50-year-old former Marylander who lives in Woodland Waters, north of Weeki Wachee. Finnigan, who confesses that she has never won a spelling bee, says it is no crime to be a bad speller. Nor is it an embarrassment to consult a dictionary for every fifth word. It is just that it galls her to see billboards, storefronts and newspaper headlines littered with bad spelling, bad grammar or both. People who are painting signs, pasting on billboards or writing headlines should know better, Finnigan said. She considers such attention to detail to be a true indicator of the quality a person can expect from a business. What saddens her as much as anything is that few people notice the blatant errors around them. Among the photographs Finnigan sent to the Times was a picture of a furniture store. Painted in 3-foot-tall letters above its front door is a sign that reads "DINNING ROOMS.". More often, she finds confusion about the possessive pronoun "its" and the contraction "it's," the mutilation of "theirs" (often it is mistakenly written as theirs') and the misapplication of the adjective "everyday" with the phrase "every day." Finnigan, who worked for 17 years in a Maryland school system as an interpreter for the deaf, said she knows why spelling is so wretched. During her time in schools, Finnigan said, she noticed that teachers frequently misspelled words they wrote on chalkboards. And as they devoted more time to standardized tests, she also saw the teachers spending less time with kids on basics such as spelling and grammar. Finnigan grew up in a home where she was not allowed to watch television. She said that reading a lot helped her learn words at which generations of TV zombies only guess. Becoming an interpreter also helped her spelling. There are a number of spoken words with no sign language equivalent. When that happens, interpreters must spell out the words. Such attention to the language has become something of an obsession for Finnigan. At mom-and-pop restaurants, she pulls out a pen and, for sport, circles the misspellings in the ads that appear on the paper place mats. Finnigan packs a camera when she travels in case she encounters something egregious. Among her specimens is a restaurant named "Incredible Vegetible" and a Blockbuster video marquee that describes a movie as "cute, clever, mischevious," as opposed to mischievous. Finnigan's treasure trove of grammar and spelling errors includes several gems from the pages of the Times. She has caught the newspaper making boo-boos in headlines, photo captions and several advertisements. And, as noted in the story about Hernando High's millennium mishap, the Times blew the spelling of millennium at least 16 times from 1998 to 2000. The paper spelled the word correctly another 2,637 times, a 99.4 percent accuracy rate.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From today's Pasco Times |
