Poles Apart
One of the reasons you can't just rely on a spellchecker and a grammar checker (still a useless thing in my experience) is that sometimes all the words are spelled properly and assembled according to all the grammatical rules, but one of them is just the wrong word, and nobody noticed, and it throws the whole sentence/paragraph/composition out of whack.
This morning, Jim and I were looking at ordering contacts lenses online, and you can't possibly care about that so I'll just get right to the point, which is that he works for Blue Cross and so we get discounts on some things, and so we were looking at a site called Blue Advantage, which lists all those discounts.
One of the companies from which you can receive a theoretically good deal is Urban Poling, which sounds dirty but is actually just a supplier for those ski poles that you sometimes see people walking around the city using incorrectly. (They're obviously meant to be used rather vigorously, pushing off with each step to really bring the upper body into play rather than letting the whole operation of walking be a lower-body phenomenon: more usually, you will see people holding them rather listlessly, tapping them on the ground if at all, and probably wondering what they were thinking when they paid at least a hundred bucks for them. Even in my dinky little cityette you see people with them: trendy big cities probably have miniature armies of users.)
Okay. That's the setup. Now the payoff. Here's a sentence from the Blue Advantage page for Urban Poling:
By using poles, you use 90% of your muscles and increase your caloric intake by 20%.
Increase your caloric intake by 20%? Is there an attachment that shoves an éclair into your gob every hundredth step? Or could it be that the writer meant to say "expenditure", and there was no editor so nobody caught it?
This morning, Jim and I were looking at ordering contacts lenses online, and you can't possibly care about that so I'll just get right to the point, which is that he works for Blue Cross and so we get discounts on some things, and so we were looking at a site called Blue Advantage, which lists all those discounts.
One of the companies from which you can receive a theoretically good deal is Urban Poling, which sounds dirty but is actually just a supplier for those ski poles that you sometimes see people walking around the city using incorrectly. (They're obviously meant to be used rather vigorously, pushing off with each step to really bring the upper body into play rather than letting the whole operation of walking be a lower-body phenomenon: more usually, you will see people holding them rather listlessly, tapping them on the ground if at all, and probably wondering what they were thinking when they paid at least a hundred bucks for them. Even in my dinky little cityette you see people with them: trendy big cities probably have miniature armies of users.)
Okay. That's the setup. Now the payoff. Here's a sentence from the Blue Advantage page for Urban Poling:
By using poles, you use 90% of your muscles and increase your caloric intake by 20%.
Increase your caloric intake by 20%? Is there an attachment that shoves an éclair into your gob every hundredth step? Or could it be that the writer meant to say "expenditure", and there was no editor so nobody caught it?
posted by pyramus | 7:47 AM
1 Comments:
I just wanted to point out that we have access to Blue Advantage because I bring health-care benefits into the household, not because I'm an employee.
Anyone with benefits through one of the Canadian Blue Cross affiliates has access to it.
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