A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: Camera product copy | Main | Next: Gas station vestibule
September 5, 2005 12:03 AM
Broken: Liverpool FC sign
Paul P writes that "after this Champions League Final (Liverpool FC won AC Milan), they sure need a better banner to display their hard-earned glory."
someone spent a little too much time playing, and not quite enough time at school. id love to see this on one of their resumes. King's forever!
Thats a banner made by an individual, not the club itself. For some reason it's a sort of tradition that Liverpool supporters really spend a lot of effort creating banners and signs to take to matches/hang outside pubs.
Still broken, but not really special - the "greengrocer's apostrophe" is a really common error.
That apostrophe thing is running rampant. The other day I came across comments in a blog and the person had written something like, "I have far too many hats."
They then wrote another comment to "correct" themselves and wrote, "I meant 'hat's'."
GAH!
re: kip
"im sorry, but i cant see whats wrong with this"
That's because you have a similar problem with punctuation. Your comment should be: "I'm sorry, but I can't see what's wrong with this."
"King's of Europe" should be "Kings of Europe".
And, um.. bn... it's "That's a banner..." ;)
Tee-hee! Fun with apostrophe's!
"If you want it to be possesive then it's just I-T-S, and if it's supposed to be a contraction then it's I-T-apostrophe-S"
It's a grammatical song.
It has nothing to do with "living in the us". It has to do with being literate in English. The apostrophe shouldn't be there.
It's funny because they're stupid.
The grocer's apostrophe is indeed extremely common in the UK and I think has entered the vernacular. I wouldn't be surprised if those making the banner were perfectly aware of it.
Why is it call the "grocer's apostrophe?" If the answer is no better than "it's the way it appears at the supermarket," I feel cheated.
That sign would be even better if it had some superfluous quotation marks.
"Liverpool 'F.C.'"
'King's' of "Europe"
Now it's perfect.
English is not my first language and I immediately caught the error. How sad is to see that people can't spell correctly...
What is really broken is the schools and education system that are unable to teach people to write and spell correctly even simple words and senetences.
I won't lay an additional beating on the apostrophe dead horse. But there is another delicious irony in the post that criticizes grammar.
"Liverpool FC won AC Milan" - they won the team? So now AC Milan belongs to Liverpool FC?
Reminds me of my all-time most hated ad:
"You've got questions? We've got answers!"
(You have got questions? We have got answers!)
Why not just proper english?
"You have questions?" "We have answers!"
Our language is being massacred, even by advertising firms & people who appparently didn't study (or pass) English.
I think the problem is not just that advertising types don't learn english; it's that they then teach kids the wrong way to spell and puncuate. More funding to Public Schools!
My God, Sido! I hope you're kidding on the more-funding part! Public school English classes are the ones that don't teach you anything! Every public English class i have ever been in has been exactly the same, from first through twelfth. What we need is actual English being taught, then and only then should we consider increasing spending, of all things.
Yes, you are right PAT, I must've been too excited while writing an email to this site; of course it is improper to say "LFC won ACM," it should say "LFC beat ACM." And I always thought I was so grammatically accurate..... I felt so stupid while reading this....
Thank you bob. english should be an elective after 5th grade (by which point if u cant read and write already, ur screwed, and if u can, u dont need english class now do u). why are there standardized tests for FICTION WRITING???? (that means not real, for all you public school veterans/victims) why have schools stopped teaching life skills, and started training a generation of jeapordy players? dont give more cash, take cash away from useless classes, use it to hire good teachers, to hire someone to come up with a useful curriculum, to hire some trustworthy students to point out the teachers who do nothing until their superior shows up. and use some leftover change to print up student surveys, along the lines of "do u think learning poetry and shakespeare in english class will help you succeed in life and get a good job?"
onery, leave the radioshack ad out of this. you're wrong anyhow, because the ad is "you've got questions." with a period. they're TELLING you that "you have got questions", not asking if you do. maybe you'd consider the fact that they're expecting so many confused consumers to be broken, but the grammer in the ad ISN'T.
sorry, had to get that out.
Bob, pupples did remember the apostrophe and the apostrophe was acceptable. It is hard to see because the capital T blends in with it ('T = ' T), and isn't is a contraction, where apostrophes are necessary.
(I know you know one of those, but I wanted to be sure I covered your problem.)
Hmm... I have an unlikely scenario:
Maybe the team is sponsored by a "King's of Europe",King being the name of the owner.Not likely , but the only way of making this sign make sense.
was gonna get on Bob's case at 1st read of the word twelfth.
Looked it up and that's the correct spelling.
So.... in our "Rules with Exceptions" English, how is it that the spelling TWELVE becomes TWELFTH ?
(The more you say it, the more difficult to enunciate, ya know)
I myself am in public school (9th grade) and can testify to how horribly usless the English classes are. I mean, how the heck is memorizing all 54 prepositions going to help anyone getting a job! Please, someone give me a good reason why, I dare you.
WOW....kip, and NICK, you both are truly retarded. I do not understand how you people STILL can't figure out what is wrong with this when it was explained before both of your comments. Please, let's graduate from second grade and learn to read. Thank you, come again.
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Camera product copy | Main | Next: Gas station vestibule
Howdy!
FIRST!
England Is Good!
Posted by: Seth Nelson at September 5, 2005 12:23 AM