Ad Infinitum

So as I said yesterday, I tried the crankier thing and it didn't really work for me. I'm just cranky enough, I guess. Not that I have any particularly strong aversion to the word "fuck"; I swear way too much as it is. (Speaking of the f-word: check out this website, which importunes people to print out that word in various sizes on sticker paper and then attach them to commercial signage; "No Parking" becomes "No Fucking", movie posters become magnificently obscene, and so on. If stickers with the word "fuck" on them start appearing in inappropriate but hilariously fitting places around Moncton, it won't be me who did it--I'm too big a chicken--but it'll be me laughing a lot.)

Today we have two things that I've kvetched about before, but by god, they keep showing up, and I'm going to keep kvetching about them until people smarten the hell up. First, take a look at this from Gawker.com. "Who's Bald Spot Is That?", asks the increasingly irrelevant Esquire Magazine. Aargh! How can there be a copy editor anywhere on the face of the Earth who doesn't know that in English, apostrophe-ess denotes possessives in nouns but not in pronouns? For (I hope) the last time: apostrophe-ess affixed to a pronoun invariably denotes a contraction with the word "is" (which is why "she's" is a valid word and "her's" isn't). It's just not that hard to learn.

Second, a billboard advertising the services of the New Brunswick dental profession featuring dentures in a glass of water next to some approximation of the legend "If you don't see your dentist regularly, you'll need a ninth glass of water everyday". Aargh again! It's a full-sized billboard; it must have passed under the eyes of at least twenty people on its journey from low-rent ad-agency concept to sub-par execution, and did not one of them, not one, know that "every day" is a noun clause which, when jammed into a single word, becomes an adjective and therefore the wrong part of speech in that context?

So; still pretty cranky.