The Article:
“Typos a la Carte” by Jane Black. The Washington Post, June 18th, 2008.
The Problem:
What should you do when you find typos on a restaurant menu?
The Solution:
The presence of an improper apostrophe on a menu can ruin an otherwise delicious meal for a white person. Jane Black recommends asking for an extra copy of the menu, taking out a pen and marking all of the mistakes. When you are finished, you should then leave the restaurant with the hope that the chef will see the mistake and correct it before your next visit. This is considered the best solution since it allows you to use proper grammar while simultaneously avoiding confrontation (#128 in the book).
The other option is to simply recognize that the typos, while egregious, do not prevent actual meaningful communication on these menus. This would allow you to escape the tag of “elitist,” “pretentious,” or “banned from eating here for the rest of your life.”
Final Verdict:
It is the duty of every white person to correct typos. It is worth the risk of banishment to deliver proper grammar to those who need it.
Further reading (as they were mentioned in the article):
Reminder
Contest ends TOMORROW at 12:00 p.m. EST (9:00 a.m. PST) – we have over 400 entries already.
Stuff White People Like 
What happens when the menu and the typos are in a language other than English?
I read this in the print Post and wondered why they even wasted the space on the article. Though I admittedly scanned the article for typos.
Anyone else find it ironic that her last name is Black?
wow this is a joke. I always see typos and never mention or think 2 words about them. You’re not there to show off your spelling skills, you’re there to eat you pretentious [woman].
Irony… lol you funny guy. I see Irony in the fact that you found it Ironic….
My personal favorite is when I see “shrimps” on a menu.
Oh, come on.
That newspaper article was essentially a parody of itself. This made your job way too easy, clander.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shrimp
I want to run off, screaming into the night whenever I see “shrimp scampi,” “shrimp scampi-style,” “in its own juice, au jus” or “tamale” on any menu.
Someone once told me that there is a typo on every menu. I don’t know if people do it intentionally (have other people heard that?), but ever since, it’s like a game to see how fast I can find the typo. And you know what? Every time I look for one, I seem to be able to find one.
What rational being seriously gives a crap about typos in a menu? Really, are you there to eat or to be a lunatic English teacher? As long as the information in the menu is understandable so that I can find what I want, all I care about is the quality of the food and the quality of the service, and that’s it. Getting worked up over spelling and grammar in what is essentially just a list is sheer foolishness. Eat already, ya durned idgits.
Although, it would be cool to see some chef put his boot up some obsessive’s butt for pointing out typos in the menu. I would come back to that restaurant even if I didn’t really like the food. 😉
While I refrain from actually making corrections, it drives me nuts to see typos (or blatant misspellings) on menus. My favorite is white board at the sandwich place next to my office that advertises a “bagel with lochs and cream cheese”. One of these days I’m going to go in there and ask them how they’ve managed to get a Scottish lake to fit on a bagel.
What is sad isn’t the fact that Whitey Don’t Like Typos so much as that the Washington Post actually PAID somebody to write that article.
First!
Ha ha, bitches!
There’s a deli by our office that sells “Pickle Sprears” and “Minestone Soup”. It is called the NY Bagel Cafe.
http://www.thechrisivesexperience.com
NICE. In your fucked up face, Jamie the pretentious pig.
WHY? You know what the fuck they’re talking about. Don’t you have anything better to obsess over, you idiot? I feel sorry for your boyfriend. I bet HE’S the one who wants to run screaming into the night. Hose bag. I hate you. Die.
GOD. You are an IDIOT. Has anyone else noticed that all the people saying they are into this shit are CHICKS?
Jesus. This article and all the comments to this post aren’t improving my opinion of the world one fucking bit.
What if I like to come across as elitist or pretentious? How do you confront without being banned from the delicious, incorrectly spelled food?
You’re missing a grave accent on the A in à la carte.
And then the chef comes running out, finds out who marked up his/her menu, tracks the perp down, has the waitstaff hold the offending grammer geek down, and then stuffs the damned menu down said geek’s throat.
At least, that’s what would happen in a just world.
Amen to you if you want to be elitist and pretentious… Some people are just better than others..
O’Doyle Rules!
http://www.thechrisivesexperience.com
There’s always at least one white person in the group who can read the other language (they think) and will point out the typos. All white people know enough French to get through a menu, and most know something of at least one other language – Italian, German, or a Scandinavian language. If the group is at an Asian restaurant, chances are someone knows some Japanese or Chinese. Hindi or Tai, however, are a problem.
I’d point out that typos and punctuation errors have very little to do with “delivering proper grammar”… but I fear this would only prove your larger point.
I actually enjoy errors on menus (without correcting them). In Greece recently I saw a sign for a restaurant that served, among other things, “T-Bong Steak.”
Er… well… um… I’ve actually done this – more than once.
“Every spot in town now has navarins, gnudi or panna cotta, which lend themselves to creative spellings.”
Hey Black, try looking at Strunk and White, Elements of Style, 2nd Edition, New York: Macmillan, 1972, for the correct use of the serial comma, and stick one after your gnudi.
go read a book.
Did you completely miss the Oxford comma discussion here?
Interesting that Strunk and White like it too, they’re American, right?
That comma seems pretty redundant to me.
Where was the Harvard-comma discussion?
Can I get a hallelujah!?
Aim high, bitches.
Oh, I don’t remember. Really just looking for an excuse to quote Vampire Weekend:
Who gives a f*** about an Oxford comma?
oh, I get it you said Harvard.
Ha ha
I think Christian Lander is going to Harvard next month for the book launch I read somewhere so I am sure they will correct him … lol
Chris
http://www.thevisitingbrit.com
What about those “hacek” things in czech? He played hockey too, right?
I have no problem with “au jus”, however I cringe whenever the server asks me: “do you want the au jus added on top of your beef?” especially when she pronounces it “aw juice”.
While that’s the correct French spelling, it’s not necessary in English.
Typographical errors are *not* grammatical errors. White prescriptivists and pedants, should at least, get a linguistics degree, because forgetting to punctuate is *not* making an error in syntax, morphology, phonology and so forth.
lyk if aye todally wrote lyk dis
it is not an error of grammar — it is an error of orthography.
That is because every native speaker knows the full grammar of his or her native language. Biological evolution ensured this. Not every native speaker however, knows the conventions of orthography.
Please do not call omissions of commas grammatical errors. That is an insult to native speakers everywhere, since native speakers do not make grammatical mistakes out of ignorance, but rather slippage, and malformed orthography != malformed grammar.
That is, you do not teach someone grammar. You teach them how to analyse the grammar of their own language to prevent slippage.
Pedants who insist that the masses remain uneducated of some prescriptivist rule in grammar remain ignorant of both evolutionary psychology and linguistics.
Obviously, you’re TWKOWP.
Some people can best serve the world by leaving it.
Bad Self – You are even more white than me. I did not even catch the Vampire Weekend reference. Well done.
OMG I KNOW!!!!!!!!!1!1!! How uncivilized!1!! Those people shouldn’t even be serving us!! a-holes should all just die awesome deaths or at least be blinded by hot bacon grease for thinking they could serve us with such improper manners!!!
P.S. – Bart’s a douche, Jennifer’s a hose bag. Thank you, good night.
Shut it. I wish you actually had to fight every day for your survival so dumb things like this wouldn’t take up so much of your attention.
If you find a typo on a menu you should fix it, take a picture, and enter the contest put on by TEAL (Typo Eradication Advancement League): http://www.jeffdeck.com/teal/blog/
i used to do layout and design for a bunch of restaurants’ menus. the main reason there are typos is that restaurant managers are usually cheap @$$holes who haggle the price down to next-to-nothing and then take 6 months to pay the final invoice. i ain’t fixin that sh*t for free.
my favorite was when the guy from kinko’s called me wanting to know the password on the PageMaker zip file he’d been given by my (now former-) client. he was, you guessed it, being asked to fix typos.
i told him he’d get the password only when my invoices were all paid in full…
What happens when the typo is in another language?
It is the white person’s chance to SHINE!
I worked at a French restaraunt in college… White people who caught out somewhat intentional typos (being in Ohio, we sometimes opted for phonetic spellings)… To impress the table and cow the waiter making $2.14 an hour server min wage, they felt obligated to tell me they studied french and lived in France for a year… Further our salade niçoise (where we eggregiously left out the “e” in “salade”) was NOTHING like what they experienced when they would sup on it in little cafes in Paris! (Apparently the French use canned tuna – “But GOOD canned tuna!” whereas we used sushi-grade tuna….)
What did they want me to do? Rip up the menus, promise a reprint, and replace the quality tuna for the more authentic canned shit?
Interestingly, only white women who spent a year after college “studying art” (or what the hell ever) ever pointed this out. That and some Frog who left a $3.00 tip on a $55.00 bill. I could not help myself – as that asshole left I used my high school foreign language and bid him: Auf wiedersehen, mein Herr!
Asshole.
Check out this Menu fail:
http://englishfail.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/menu-fail/
I will not call omissions of commas grammatical errors. I must say, however, we all need a little slippage once in a while. I mean, what would life be without good food, good drink and a little slippage for dessert? Of course, life would a lot better if we could rid ourselves of nit picking obsessive know-it-all’s.
Typos! What about font abuse? Too many fonts spoil many a good menu. I love to comment on bad fonts out in the world and menus have some of the worst offenses. Pair the typos and fonts with poorly shot pictures of food and you have the trifecta.
hehe — so true! i loved when people would insist on ALL CAPS ITALIC SCRIPT FONTS which pretty much renders any text completely unreadable.
are we designing a menu or a fucking ransom note here?
and people would literally say to me, “can you font that up for me” — like what does “fonting” something up actually mean? everyone seemed to have their own definition. at some point if i “punch up”, “font up”, “bold up” every piece of text on the menu then nothing stands out. but no one cared.
this pretty much sums it up for me:
http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/
No kidding. If it’s an egregious typo, I won’t eat there again and I tell the server that whoever makes up the menus needs to go back to school.
I have my mother to thank for this.
Sorry, error by omission: “whomever”.
It’s like people who refer to “chaise” as “tchayz”.
I think you mean “nit-picking, obsessive know-it-alls”.
I would do the same thing. However, they’re working there for a reason: they’re dipshits. It would go right over their heads.
You left out GW Bush. I can see why, though. Nit-picky people are far more caustic to the world than he is.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Great comeback.
I love you.
Sort of.
Not really.
No, Knibb High Football rules!
This is sooo a white thing, and mostly a white person blog, I bet is only whitey responding now. Its should be a blog for black people to know what white people like, dam sure you’ll never find a black person correcting a menu, because they already know the menu back and forth even if they can’t read it.
In a just world there would be more people who give a crap about their language.
What’s a vampire weekend?
Never mind. I’ll use Google to find out.
How does someone end up with a job that pays you to do pretty much nothing? I don’t how much it pays, but if I could kick it at home, drink beer, play Xbox 360, watch movies, and once in a while pump out an article about some nonsense and get paid for it, I’d definitely have to think about it. I wonder if the person who wrote this article has a degree. I mean, what degree do I need to do nothing and make a living at it? Maybe I’ll check out DeVry and see if they have the BA in Doing Nothing at All–hell, maybe I’ll go for the Masters or Doctorate.
Seriously, Indiana University offers a degree in General Studies. A BA in bloody General Studies! Hey, I got a degree in studying, I can study your ass under the table, man, I know a lot of general stuff. Next semester I’m going for the big one: Master of Thingies; with a Masters in Thingies, I’ll rule the world!
The world is strange.
The thing is, mostly they’re not typos. They are blatant misspellings for which lazy idiots could not open a dictionary to correct–or to ensure it was spelled correctly. Typos are a finger slipping on the keyboard and writing “teh” instead of “the”. Or using multiple exclamation points and slipping a “1” in.
Then there’s the apostrophe catastrophe. That’s just punishable stupidity. The rules are simple. People are just lazy.
Oh, that’s fantastic! I love it!
Oh Jesus. Whites can never have their own anything.
That’s a whole ‘nother blog.
Typos on menus are simply unacceptable. The menu is the most important marketing tool a restaurant has and a poorly written or designed menu lowers the value or cache of the restaurant. I don’t care if it is a foreign restaurant…there are plenty of editors around who would love to proof a menu. It’s sloppy and lazy.
http://twowhiteboys.com/2008/
Typos and grammatical errors are one of my biggest pet peeves — whether they’re on a menu, in a movie, or in song lyrics. It’s gotten to the point where I scare myself and embarrass myself regularly when I point them out. Most of my friends aren’t “white” in the sense that people described on this blog are “white.”
Here’s an example of a lyric that makes me cringe every time I hear it. In the Talking Heads song “Don’t Worry About the Government,” one of the lines is: “I think of the people that are working for me.” It should be “people WHO are working for me.” And the Talking Heads are supposed to be literate …
Take a chill pill, Slappy. Lyrics are supposed to be who the artists want them to be. Usted sabe?
Of course, an advanced level white person will never point out English errors on a menu at a “legit” Asian/Chinese restaurant to the servers. On the contrary, advanced whites are annoyed by people who try to tell Chinese people how to “fix” their menus and signs in restaurants.
“Excuse me, it’s ‘fried food,’ not ‘flied food’.” That is about the least white thing that a person could say.
Nascar-level whites, however, are ready to nuke all of Asia to respond to such disrespect of the American language. Nascar whites do not see anything wrong with disrespecting other Satanic tongues such as French or Arabic.
http://www.engrish.com/recent_detail.php?imagename=fly-mix.jpg&category=Menus&date=2008-05-15
I grew up in the states and my whole life I thought an entre’ meant the main course but it turns out my home country is insane because entre’ actually means appetizer
Make the Logo Big
How about the Kia car, spelled Sorento? It’s missing another “R”.
bagel with lochs
Smoked salmon is more Scottish than it is Semitic.
Typos are different from improper grammar, though. I think the grammar bothers white people much more. It’s the difference between pointing out that you’re a klutz and can’t type properly versus pointing out that you have managed to be agressively ignorant enough to become literate while failing to learn basic grammar.
Don’t sweat this stuff dubya. The world of the annoying and banal (i.e. Jane Black “a food writer”) is beneath the dignity of a White person.
I doubt Jane Black is even White. I wonder it she’s related to Conrad Black the swindler publisher who own(ed) the Jerusalem Post? Related to uber-vulgar Jack Black?
Black is rarely a White name, lol!!!! It’s usually the surname of a Semite.
what about typos that are mental ones, not finger-slips?
Like typing “it” instead of “if”, or their instead of there, etc.
What are those called?
Get even by writing a bad food review on the local food blog.
I love fonts. Fonts, manuscripts, calligraphy are totally White.
Can anyone here cite the black high school drop-out rate? before Civil Rights (and welfare state), and after it?
Blacks could improve their reading levels as a group.
And the Talking Heads are supposed to be literate …
Yes, literate about homosexual activism, maligning Whites, etc. That’s about it.
Overrated!
French isn’t satanic, what are you talking about. Have you ever heard someone speak Hebrew or Arabic? Those languages make French sound like a lullaby.
interesting
In other words the truth that seems to be eluding you is that “entre’” means “main course”, but other countries have a different usage, huh? Holy crap I can’t wait til you learn that in England a “saloon” is a 4-door car. What next, a bison rant?
I Am Aware of All Internet Traditions™
So that explains why Barrack Obama can never finish reading more than half a book?
I can handle a little typo or misspelling here and there, but if a menu is set in a bad font (usually one that’s too decorative or “quirky”, although oftentimes Comic Sans is the culprit) I find it terribly distracting and I can barely read the menu. It makes me lose my appetite for a minute. Then I get over it.
But really, I’d rather the chef or manager just printed out a menu from Word set in Arial, than hire their nephew who took a graphic design class a few years ago and has a pirated copy of Photoshop and knows where the “cool” free font websites are.
Have you heard about the guy that goes across america and corrects typos on signs, menus, store windows etc? Its really funny because he has like this fanny pack with all the materials to correct signs, including different colored markets, white out, pens, window markets etc.
Im going to start my own sandwich shop called TYPO and everything on the menu will be spelled incorrectly. The fun in the shop will be trying to figure out what your ordering because everything from “white bread” to “turkey” will be spelled like Whight Bred and Terkee. Sounds like unintelligent fun to me. And everything will be 15 dollars.
god white people are so pretentious. How do we even breathe without thinking about it?
While I’ve read this blog religiously for some time and usually do nothing but laugh my ass off, I, for the first time, am embarrassed that people are actually writing articles on this and wasting time and space.
“Mine has always been tamer. No costume. No drama. In my fantasy, I enter a restaurant, order and sweetly ask the waiter if I can “hold on to the menu” during dinner. Then, using a distinctive purple pen, I discreetly copy-edit the descriptions of the dishes.”
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!
This might as well say, “while other people may have idiosyncrasies about them, let me spend the next ten minutes of your time telling you indirectly why I am interesting, pompous, and original.”
I can just picture this woman at her Apple computer with a coffee, a scarf, and a knowing what’s best for poor people.
on a semi-related note… did anyone see the AFI Film Special on CBS the other night? they misspelled Steven Spielberg’s name TWICE!!! they spelled it “Speilberg”
i can’t tell you how superior that made me feel 🙂
Brainos.
I could just swear some writers are trying to get their articles posted on this blog so someone will read them.
No no no, it’s spelled, “Raymond Luxury Yacht,” but it’s pronounced, “Throatwobbler Mangrove”.
I have! And I really, really, really fucking hate it because it’s not at all funny – it’s pretentious and obnoxious! Yay! 😡
http://stuffgodhates.wordpress.com/
I think it’s hilarious that, according to the article writer, it’s okay if ethnic or foreign restaurants make grammatical errors. Oh, they’re not white, it’s okay if they can’t spell! But god forbid a white person make a mistake on a menu!
Hilarious how according to the article writer, it’s okay if foreign or ethnic restaurants make grammatical errors. Oh, they’re not white, it’s okay if they can’t spell! I don’t expect them to! But god forbid a white person make a mistake on the menu!
actually, my family lives on food stamps. come again?
I am the opposite of the pedant; but it was hardly a nitpick, but a fundamental principle of linguistics. Grammatical errors come through either two things: from a misinformed non-native speaker or through slippage of the mind. Native speakers do not commit grammatical errors out of ignorance. This is an important distinction to make, as being mistaken in this area perpetuates an ignorance of its own that justifies prescriptivist language bigotry of every sort (“English as a national language,” Eurocentrism, prejudice against language diversity, perpetuation of prescriptivist pedantry in general, etc.) A *scientific* principle that has to be clarified.
Prescriptivism is an irrational faith; linguistics is a science.
Typos are certainly upsetting to any literate white person. I persoanlly went on a mission while in Dubai, Turkey, and Mexico making corrections to menus, writing the correct spelling of works as they should have appeared on store signs and, some case finding myself having substitute words. While one never enegages in good acts for the sake of karma, I could feel my good karma rising, even as I left some store owners a bit baffled.
Typos are most annoying when they appear in books published by the big American and British publiushing houses. They have no excuse whatsoever, but they have gotten sloppy in recent years, publishing content received from the writer “as is”.
OMG I REMEMBER THAT! I havent heard that in forever! Isnt that from monty python?
Monty Python could be a post in and of itself. White people love it.
Someones head rolled for that.
Exactly, ethnic minorites expect so much from white people, and that includes spelling correctly, I mean who else is going to do it? Spanish people?
Camel toes ’87, whoever was perfectly fine. If you wrote ‘… I tell the server that whomever they recommend …’, then it’s okay to use ‘whomever’.
I’m sorry, but the original article was great. It was far better than the SWPL re-write.
Ausgezeichnet!
I have noticed that it is only white people who are insecure in some profound sense who seem to need to point out the typos to the staff. Especially, if the restaurant is located in a place where the correct spellings are (as you suggest) sometimes foregone in order to be a bit more intelligible to the normal clientele.
If the food is good, it doesn’t much matter what it’s called, and if it’s not good, the most assiduous care to the linguistic detail of the menu will not improve the taste.
It’s another thing entirely to note (and perhaps even mock a bit) the misspellings among a group of friends, but in my experience, it rarely happens unless the food does not meet expectations — in which case it’s seen as a part of some level of pretension that’s all of a piece.
This is true.
It’s done deliberately to keep white people distracted so they don’t bother the restaurant staff.
;o)
this article made me cringe.
I can’t believe I agree with you, but yeah.
If it is one of those made up car names (another fun wp drinking game btw), it really shouldn’t be so close to a real name. The best go way off the map, like the Toyota Yaris or Vitz…
I got “shay” for chaise at EQ3 the other day.
How?
I’d prefer the anglo-ed out chayzzze to that.
but communication and meaning are paramount.
I thought it was Irish, or are we back to the sweater, Celt thing?
It’s awesome on baking soda biscuits.
Oh for God’s sake – I’m a white female, college-educated, and a magazine editor and even *I* don’t care if there are spelling and punctuation errors on a menu. Bring me lovely food, and quickly–I don’t care about your writing skills!
Get a grip!
I’m happy if there’s enough light in the restaurant with which to read the menu in the first place.
Umm, typo in your post. Marker, not market. Gothcha!
So I take it that white peole are snobs and they llok for various avenues to display their superiority complex?
http:stuffgirlslike.wordpress.com
I actually adore the typos at my favorite restaurants. I feel it adds to the authenticity and ambience. Asian restaurants and “Southern Cooking” establishments have very peculiar typos that are especially fun. I don’t need to correct those. Now if you are not a foreign or specialty restaurant, watch out, I’m white!
What’s worse than cheap restaurant owners?
Crap designers who work for a low rate (get “haggled-down”) then get pissed about it and produce crap work. You hand over work with typos?!
Talk about bringing the value of the profession down in more ways than one! He’s probably thinking poorly of you, why pay promptly when there are errors in it?
I should’ve just written you off when you mentioned that you use PageMaker dude. But it is these kind of practices that keep people thinking they can just get stuff designed by some goof with a mac and CS3 (in your case, not-so-much) for 20 bucks an hour and forget about the bigger picture.
Your job as a designer is to educate clients on their communication needs, not create more issues for them by slapping a drop-shadowed, gradient-happy, logo-enlarged cheap flyer on them.
And one should be able to master all three.
I should have gone with my gut. I replied and thought it didn’t look right, but I was wrong.
Oh well. Thanks for the heads-up.
we need to just let it go
http://www.Shop-Luscious.com
Authenticity, eh? So typos on the menu of a “Southern cooking establishment” authentically make the south look like a bunch of dipshits and Asian restaurants look like first-generation ignorant immigrants.
All it takes is some proofreading. That’s it. You can even find proofreaders on Craigslist. I would be embarrassed if I took someone to a restaurant and its menu was riddled with typos.
Perfect example of why this is so passionate among white people: others just let it go.
Well that may be true but a lot of street and commercial graphics from Latin America and India have a vibrancy, strength and attention to detail that N. American commercial typography hasn’t seen since the fifties (of course there are exceptions).
Yes! Finally someone gets it!
Yeah the Italians make it easier with that Primi, Secondi stuff…
Ouch. That spelling is reminiscent of what a German spelling of his name would be.
He got pwned.
My favorite situation is when “Live and Let Die” came out and Sir Paul was LAMBASTED for “in this ever-changing world in which we live in.” d00d set everyone straight and basically told ’em all they were a bunch-o-dumbasses, that’s not what he sang.
GO, PAUL!
# 20
https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/23/20-being-an-expert-on-your-culture/
I think that the menus at random Chinese restaurants do it best.
http://theFitnessDiva.blogspot.com
I don’t mind typos on menus. For example, at a mexican resturant if they misspell “sauce” it indicates that the proprietors of said establishment have not been fully assimilated therefore making their cusine more authentico!
You have to be careful what you order though.
good. Take all this energy worrying about commas and grammatical errors, go get yourself an education in a field that is helpful to society, and go get yourself a better paying job so you can get your sorry ass off of food stamps.
Come in your mouth?
Isn’t it funny that a good number of English majors are currently employed in resturants and yet still so many grammatical errors on menus?
I think you mean “Gotcha!”
Seriously, typo’s on a menu are like MY BIGGEST BUGBEAR.
I used to work in a restaurant where we wrote specials on a chalk board. We used to intentionally put typos on it just to see how many life-less douche bags pointed it out. Sometimes they even asked for chalk to correct it for us. I wanted to say “Eat your food and shut the f-ck up”…but I didn’t because I’m white and I avoid confrontation.
God, you’re so angry.
My favorite menu typo was at a Japanese restaurant in South Norwalk. They served Fried Crams. I could just imagine the proprietor reading the menu copy to the printer over the phone. My wife and I refer to clams as crams to this day.
I didn’t bother correcting it, though.
I heard it once referred to as “old juice”, I said no, I prefer the “new juice” please
I once worked in a resturant where this girl, who was obviously the “pretty” girl from the trailer park not the “smart” one mind you, ordered the taco salad with the following request:
“leave the guatemala on the side”
This was the same resturant where people would ask all too often,
“Are the Beef ribs made of pork?”
I said no, they are made of chicken
Also asked in the same resturant,
“What is the difference between grilled shrimp and fried shrimp?”
It is the kind of question that makes you dumber to answer. The average clientele of said establishment weren’t into correcting menus, but they could probably win a good deal of international rib eating competitions.
Soylent green is never spelled wrong on menus.
well it was the 90s then and Quark was still “new”… and InDesign was still a dream in some Object-Oriented programmers head. PageMaker was pretty much the gold standard back then.
you know, you try to bring the whole profession up but at the end of the day, they beat it out of you. they really do. you don’t *start* jaded, you end up that way from years of coke-snorting assholes in Porsche’s robbing you blind when you’re trying to put yourself thru school.
whatever though — i finished engineering school, got a great job, and pretty much only think of those days when i see all caps bold italic script fonts on a lunch menu. ahh, the good old days 🙂
It’s true, I can’t stand improper grammar.
Nova = Nova Scotia, it has nothing to do with semites. Salmon cannot live in Semite lands. Not enough oxygen. Any biologists here?
Who cares? Why should a White person memorize mexiscum menu items?
The greasy taco is the most overrated dog food item that exists. Someone tell me, if the mexican national dish is meat from cheap belly cuts, like the strip steak, then what they hell do they do with the prized loin and rib cuts?
Send them to France for chateaubriand? Do mexican butchers even know anything?
Tonite
is a common mistake, intentional or not, that is seen everywhere.
Spielberg is overrated, plus he’s one seriously ugly dude. Almost all of his movies over the last 10-15, even 20 years, years have bombed with the exception of his jewish WW2 propaganda films.
Jaws was good. E.T. was lame, and what else is there?
Dude, Obama was raised by his WHITE side of the family.
Had Obama’s deadbeat dad impregnated a 17 year old black woman, instead of a duped White cunt, then Obama might very well have dropped out of HS like more than 50% of black males do.
A typo on a menu of a restaurant should be the least of our problems. That lady who wrote the article sounds like a giant tool. I hope I never have to work with her.
Aer yuo albe to raed tihs snetence?
Good, all it takes is a brain.
I’m an 18-year-old HS student who’s going to college this fall. At the moment I don’t have any other choices than minimum-wage jobs, you infidel.
I suspect grammar often doesn’t directly make anything clearer. When someone makes a grammatical mistake, it raises mental alarm bells, and is annoying, but I suspect it’s a throwback from more prehistoric days when identifying humans who were outside your “tribe” was important.
The other thing is that grammar is more of a reliability check — the equivalent of an md5 hash of a message. There are many aspects of grammar that serve to *verify* comprehension — grammar is redundant information that serves as a CRC check. Note that we humans have our language faculties evolved for speaking, not writing, consequently, and you note that we don’t make frequent mistakes in our natural spoken language.
In our hunter-gatherer days we had to communicate against noise or shout over hills, and phonemes in the same manner or place of articulation are similar and thus easily mistaken. Grammar always occurs in context — note that if someone shouted to you “corn” 200 metres away, you could easily mistake it for “horn” and vice versa. (/k/ and /h/ are similar phonemes, and the plosive nature of /k/ makes it sound almost like /h/ at long distances). But grammar has it such that when a fellow nomad shouts, “They’re selling corn 5 miles from here!” you know he did not say, “They’re selling horn 5 miles from here!” Why? Because sentence two was ungrammatical and likely to have been not said — it lacks a determiner and/or plural inflection that is necessary for “horn”.
Today however, grammar can be somewhat of a pain. It’s useful to check the integrity of messages. It should not be used as a tool of elitism. The “we should improve our grammar so our communication is more clear” argument is somewhat bullshit.
Native speakers do not “improve their grammar” — they are already equipped with all the grammatical rules of their native language, acquired from childhood, even without schooling.
An ungrammatical sentence doesn’t *directly* make a sentence less clear — it simply gives you less tools to verify that your interpretation of the sentence is a valid one (than a grammatical sentence would).
Recogntion of such facts is important if we want to eliminate language-based prejudice.
Don’t forget about typos in the church program!
dude
wtf are talking about?
that´s poetic license, song lyrics are about getting something across to the listener, in this case there are some words that SOUND better, it doesn´t mean david byrne is stupid.
Yeah the message is that blacks and other non-whites are sloppy and incapable of so much as even producing a proofread menu. Pretty racist. Myself, I think it’s worthwhile to care about “doing things right” – it’s thanks to precisely this ‘obsession’, which other races seemingly denigrate, that planes can fly and this Internet thing works and so on. If I ever start being sloppy in any of my productive endeavours I hope somebody shoots me.
“auténtico”
If their professors were more concerned about teaching than in improving ‘self esteem’ not only would they be competent at proof-reading, they might actually find a way to use their degree to put food on the table.
Although the fact that they can just download their essays and thesis from the internet might also have something to do with it.
An Arts degree is a piece of paper stating that the bearer spent years of their life drinking large amounts of alcohol, probably while smoking enough weed to cause people to mistake their dorm for a fog generator.
Hell, most of them haven’t learned the fine art of bathing.
just two weeks ago I found myself drawing a line through a word and correcting the sign: Out of Order: Sorry for the “inconvenints.”
it’s “inconvenience,” thank you. Good thing I was the last chick there, and no one could see my bathroom correction until the next morning.
danielle was here
I have a BA in English and I worked my ASS off for it because I wanted to and because to me, that piece of paper means something. Not everyone with a BA or AA or MA is a loser. That’s just rude.
I’m currently working with my therapist to overcome the confrontation avoidance issue. I’m more passive-aggressive. We’re doing hypnosis therapy. 🙂
I hope you laughed like a lunatic at her.
I’ll bet she’s procreated since then.
But they do often misspell “people”.
Truth is easy to spell. It’s telling it that’s the problem.
Truth is easy to spell. It’s telling it that’s the problem.
Ha ha…
I just got in from partying, and guess what? My cab driver was from…………….Kenya
So, I ask this guy how much he likes North America, and he says he likes it. So, I ask him why. No answer.
Then I ask him about the last Kenyan election, where they hacked each other with machetes. I ask him how this happens.
To him it is NORMAL, he says they can tell (by looks) who is who. No response because that is normal black behavior.
Draw your own conclusions.
Liberal White like to blame this behavior on “poverty:, but in West Virginia or any White nation, never have people hacked each other with machetes.
WAKE UP WHITES, see where you stand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations#National_IQ_estimates
PS Every single White person that reads this, should click on that link, and see what level of IQ the liberal whites have instituted in South Africa.
Where is Bono now?
1 in 7 has HIV, South Africa is following in the failed footsteps of Haiti and Detroit, USA.
Why cannot liberals who supported this crap admit the failure?
The black IQ of South Africa (and Detroit and New Orleans and Haiti) is ………….72.
Keep supporting the third worldization of the White nations, this is what we will get.
Black IQs are 20 points lower than Whites are.
FACT
Don’t let anti-White racists and bigots tell you otherwise via Grey’s Anatomy, Oprah or any of the the rest of the anti-White propaganda shows.
As a professional restaurant critic, I prefer to “out” menu typos in a public forum–like in a restaurant review printed in a newspaper! Ok, not really–I don’t make a habit of it– but I did do it once and many readers emailed me and said I was being mean. But the grammar was so horrible!
Well, I’m sure convinced, Portnoy – if the opinions of one taxi driver and a link to a Wikipedia article don’t constitute an unarguable truth, then hell, I don’t know what does.
What always bothers me is people who pronounce “often” wrong. No, it’s not pronounced “off-ten”. What’s ironic is that it’s always people that would consider themselves well read or who have an arts degree who mispronounce this word. It’s as if they want to prove that they can read and spell, so they pronounce the word as it’s spelled thinking that they’re in on a little secret that the “t” is actually a hard consonant that is to be pronounced when saying the word. I bet that Ms. Black says “off-ten” quite a bit.
Does this site have some kind of moderator? Because here are some comments just begging to be moderated, surely.
Hit the nail on the head. I can’t believe this shit makes the news.
Go fuck yourself. Mistakes happen and at any good restaurant that changes their menu regularly mistakes, or should I say ‘typos’ will occur. Does it make the food taste any different? I doubt it. Publish your book and keep being an asshole…I’ll keep reading your blog, but the creativity is definatly waning.
If you have any sort of customer service business it should be perfect . There are no excuses for typos. If you have typos on your menu I would have to see the state of your kitchen!
Chris
Actually, scott, check out dictionary.com’s pronunciation of often. There are three. You are wrong.
seriously? omg you are all racists. iq tests are merely so that whites can revel in their ‘intelligence’ in ‘comparison’ to others. it’s like the SAT test. it isn’t designed to be fair to everyone. grow up.
good post…. iknowblackpeople.org has something similar.
The word, “typos” should not be capitalized. And yes, the Wash Post clearly does not have enough world news to report.
actually, the mispronunciation of the word has only become accepted because of white people who like to prove that they can read by pronouncing the word as it is spelled. through wide use the mispronunciation it has become accepted. . . it’s similar to people who mispronounce the name of ever street named after a German in the city that I live thinking that a “k” before an “n” is always silent. I get it, you know how to spell “knife”, however, Knapp is not pronounced “nap”, and the lead singer of Dire Straits is not “Mark Nopfler”
Do you also pronounce “soften” as “soff-ten” pill? Maybe you could start and people will think you’re as educated and intellectual as when you say “off-ten”.
go away
go away, again
That happened in Nazi Germany, dumb ass, not here.
Capital “A” in America will help you look less stupid.
Keep talking big fella, you have yourself 99.9999% displayed as a complete fool.
I thought that was the American spelling….
hehe
At the end of the third paragraph, the writer says, “though I’d quietly applaud restaurants that spell it wrong as long as the misspelling was consistent.”
Since that’s a contrary to fact statement, she should be using the subjunctive, saying “as long as the misspelling WERE consistent.”
The love of correcting others’ grammar has less to do with knowing correct grammar oneself and more to do with being an elitist asshole.
Your next entry should be (#104)
Stuff White People Like: Being Financially Independent, Community Oriented, Socially Conscious, Law Abiding, Well Mannered, and Not Being a Burden on Society. In other words, generally things needed to have a productive society.
Unlike most minorities.
Censor me and I will become offended! On behalf of a minority, of course.
This post was spell checked and has proper grammar. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, whitey.
You have several sentence fragments. If having a verb and a subject (whether implied or stated) is not necessary to have a sentence, then why would any punctuation at all be necessary in any sentence whatsoever?
Your post has been checked and does not contain proper grammar. Maybe you should know what proper grammar is before beginning to speak about it.
you can’t be serious.
Orthography != grammar
Please educate yourself in actual linguistics before speaking further, particularly concerning psycholinguistics, syntax and anaphora.
Oh, you might want to consider the case of Native American polysynthetic languages where a single word can be inflected and regularly contain enough information to be a whole sentence.
What’s with all the menu shit stuff? Get a fucking life.
Why aren’t we happy there still ARE people who CAN notice when something is incorrect?
A little aside, it also annoys me to no end these companies that are shortening their names to this sucky toddler-speak.
Washington Mutual became WaMu
Beverages and More – BevMo
National Geographic – Nat-Geo
Thought and language are separate.
Bullshit, the dumb ass hasn’t progressed pass the fourth grade and he cheated to get there.
*cough guilty cough*
I suppose the server wouldn’t mind me making a “typo” on the credit card either…like tipping $0.25 instead of $25. It doesn’t matter to the “meaningful communication” and all…
You seem to be a nice elitist asshole.
what about typos in this blog?
“Over the years, white people have gone through a number of official cars. In the 1980s it was the Saab and the Volvo. By the 1990s it was the Volkswagen Jetta or a Subaru 4WD stastion wagon. But these days, there is only one car for white people. One car that defines all that they love: the Toyota Prius.”
thats right, a…..
staStion wagon
Exactly! I love National Geographic, but when I hear “NatGeo,” I kind of have to cringe.
Totally Dude, Totally
I agree, but Ill stick to my Subaru’s. I’m on my third one.
http://www.buyrefurbtoday.com
check out the latest MTV Made- the hippie kid turning into a model is the epitome of a white person
Never discount the possibility that the restaurant staff have already noticed the typo(s), but the manager (who wrote it) is too much of a shit to care! In such cases, I recommend just writing on the menu you were given.
WHITE MAN
Your day’s never over,
Your work’s never through!
Though you’ve tamed most of the heathen and the barbarians too!
‘Massa, thanks for ‘lectricity and the (Ah So!) internet too!
WHITEMAN, THE WHOLE WORLD’S DEPENDING ON YOU!
They tried to say that ‘you can’t jump’.
But, you made it to the moon without having to dunk.
You might not have much rhythm,
But you can (steal) carry a good tune,
WHITEMAN, THE WHOLE WORLD’S DEPENDING ON YOU!
You made it through civil rights and women’s lib too,
You’ve been through a lot, good buddy, no wonder you can sing the blues!
If the world’d open their eyes, they’d see that in the past you’re not really stuck,
Even though you still fly a rebel flag, at least it’s on a Japanese pickup truck!
Black may be beautiful, and tan may be grand,
But white’s still the color of the BIG BOSS MAN!
’Ask not’ (J.F.K.) whether it’s true,
WHITEMAN, THE WHOLE WORLD’S DEPENDING ON YOU!
The world doesn’t understand your level of stress,
Every minute’s a Malox moment, but that’s the price of success!
You watch your laptop for the first sign of loss,
Well, it’s time you paid the cost to be the boss!
Don’t drop the ball now and lose the home court advantage,
Or we’ll all have to say the pledge of allegiance in Spanish!(‘Press Uno for English’)
Only you can straighten out the world’s condition,
‘Cause you were properly conceived in the missionary position!
Stand up like a white man and do your white duty,
Or we’ll all be blown to hell by sheik your booty!
ASK NOT whether, Hillary or Obama can rule,
WHITE MAN, THE WHOLE WORLD’S DEPENDING ON YOU!
Sincerely,
Uncle Sambone
(The love-child of Uncle Sam & one
Of his female slaves)
In memory of Col. Paul Tibbets, Pilot of the Enola Gay, and all the faithful sidekicks of
‘Bwana’ …..(next page)
Jimmy Olson (Superman)
Lightning (Amos & Andy)
Poncho (Cisco Kid)
Tonto (Lone Ranger)
Robin (Batman)
Pepina (The Real McCoys)
Cheetah (Tarzan)
Trigger (Roy Rangers)
Birmingham (Charlie Chan…A whiteman in disguise)
Mingo (Daniel Boone)
Kato (The Green Horne)
Rin-Tin-Tin (If Custer had had him, he might have won!)
Rochester (Jack Benny)
Timmy (Lassie, was a ‘white’ dog!)
Uncle Ben/Aunt Jemima (Betty Crocker)
Chester & Festus (Mat Dillion, a protégé’ of John Wayne, who didn’t need a sidekick!)
Barnie Fife (Andy Griffin)
‘Condor’leeza Rice (W.)
‘It is the duty of every white person to correct typos’…
White person? How does race enter into this? Isn’t anyone else just as entitled to good grammar?
I find this blog and the concept behind it extremely offensive. Where does some punk from Toronto get off as being an expert on anything. Why is it okay to denegrate white people and white culture. Newsflash… it’s not!! Quit trying to masquerade as some pseudo-intellectual comedian, why don’t you try respecting our rights? Or, why don’t you insult Black, Latino and Asian cultures? Becasue you might be labeled a racist? You are a racist, just not in the classical sense!
Whew…..you come off as more white and poker up your ass uptight than the whitest whitey out there…..
Please tell me you are attempting white reverse humour…what you wrote is a hoot……
white people sure do like appearing clever. i as a moderately clever white person would know.
the guy who created this site is clever and displaying his cleverness to all. my sending in my $.02 to this makes me feel clever.
First, let me get this off my chest. Go blow yourself Uncle Hambone! I could hear the rap-style beat in the background as I was reading your little rhyme. Clever aren’t you? So unique! Think fast Sambone! How does a stereotype become a stereotype? And yes, the rest of the world does depend on us whiteys, whether you like it or not. White people are awesome! We invented the Internet so that we wouldn’t have to sit on the porch in the heat of the day and ‘holla’ at each other.
Now for Christian Lander. Before you label me a redneck racist, let me save you the trouble. I want to put together a set of pages called ‘What Black People Like,’ followed by a dictionary (phonetically laid out) so that we can see all of the unique and cool ways of fucking up ordinary English. I’ve noticed that black people don’t like to pronounce r’s and t’s in easy to pronounce words such as ‘rest.’ Yo, brotha, gi me duh res uh dat samwij! After that I want a White History Month, a separate awards show for white performers and other so-called artists, and I want federal funding for a White National Caucus in Congress.
Now for both of you. I guess the real problem here is actually white people. Let me explain. Whitey likes entertainment of all kinds. Especially music and sports. We have more money, on average, than anyone else, so we like to be entertained when we come home from our stressful, successful white careers. What better thing to do than put on a CD of Fitty Cent or turn on a basketball game full of players that don’t look like us. You see, white people are not smart enough to turn off the ball game or prevent their snot-nosed, spoiled whelps from buying the cultural pollution called Rap (and Hip-Hop, whatever). I would wager that most of the ballgame tickets and CD’s of Fitty are purchased by whitey. So, just remember this. As you are rising up as a people and throwing off the shackles of oppression, a good many of you have whitey to thank for it.
Now, was that racist enough for you? It is so easy to make fun of someone else. Easy to get offended isn’t it? Your rag web page is nothing but racist vitriol disguised as humor. Too bad white people aren’t smart enough to not purchase it.
I think White Dude above is deeply troubled, clearly not American because the average American white or black has a morbid fear for the letter ‘T’.
Whitey, the world doesn’t depend on you, you rode on the back of the black man to earn the money you think to have today. Remember the Opium war? Or are you too afraid of that history? You may not owe Africa trillions in debt, but you owe, guess who,… can you?
So, smart as you are honkey, you wallow in debt buying music by black people with money that you think you have, but don’t.
The Internet you are so quick to claim is based on the fundamentals of Ifa Philosophies. Ifa? Yeah go to the Internet and see what it can teach you about that.
You are far behind the times and clearly far too unintelligent to make a near decent argument about the worth of the white man.
Study Confucius, Ifa, Voodoo, and learn about Orunmila. Learn about world history and the oldest civilasations in the world. Learn how nations were built on the principles of honour and preservation.
After you have reviewed these, then we can better discuss the value of the whiteman or the lack therof.
To the Earth above,
What has your dumb ass been smoking? You believe that the internet is based on African mysticism and scientology? I will not dignify L. Ron Hubbard’s delusions with a capital S. Voodoo? Are you on crack?
And let me ask you a question, Earth. Just open your arrogant mind to the world around you and look at every place that Caucasions don’t dominate. What do you see. Poverty. Squalor. Every form of degenerate practices that there are. Backward ass religion. No science and very little industry. There’s also typically a whole lot of malnourished children because these people would rather bring a child into the world to starve than to practice birth control.
But, Earth, you may rest in this. Most of us Whiteys are asleep at the switch and the non-Whiteys are going to eventually out-breed us in our own countries. Then we will get to see who takes advantage of who. Then we will all be African. In other words, f***ed.
One more thing, Earthy. Rethink your assessment of ancient civilizations. A good many of them practiced human sacrifice, cannibalism, child sacrifice, and the worship of animal and celestial deities. Their cultures were going nowhere. It took the Europeans (yeah, you guessed it, Whitey) to bring real science, industry, and progress to the world. Confucius, Ifa, Voodoo, and Orunmila? I would laugh if I didn’t feel so damn sorry for you.
typographical errors have a beauty. they display the haste that our hands show, togather with the ease efoort. you dot my point, i suppose
You spelled civalisations wrong.
Speaking of typos, there is a typo in Christian Lander’s book, page 60, 4th line from the bottom “mate” should be “make”. Since I’m a white person, I had an overwhelming urge to report this typo.
I was once in a restaurant that had Crap Crepes listed on their lunch menu – I think they were only 10!
Good thing I don’t like crap or crab. That would have been confusing.
“whiter than white” – you got it wrong too…it’s ‘civilisations’.
Get it right yourself before critising others…
goooooood
another typo. http://tweetphoto.com/23670386
@James
asianuserwut
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