Re-reading my comment, and the original post, I can’t help but laugh at the irony in the fact that I spend all day everyday telling my students that it’s OK to make mistakes and that nobody minds or cares much!

Kelly: Yes, I think the funny English phenomenon is one that is here to stay. Most businesses don’t seem to care too much about mistakes in their English advertising and company literature. It’s not worth it to them to pay extra to have it written by a proficient native speaker–which is fine by me, because we have non-stop comedy surrounding us over here;-)

Hey Lilli!: Thanks for stoppinng by. I’ll check back in at your blog again soon, too:-)

Jim: ‘Could care less’ has been one of my pet peeves, too. It’s right up there with ‘a whole nother’ in my book. When I was in college, one of my supervisors used to say ‘irregardless’ all the time. I would tune out everything he said at that point and have this philosophical discussion with myself about whether working for an ignoramous made me an ignoramous too;-) In the end I decided that they weren’t paying me enough to take orders from a dufus!

As language teachers, we always have a fine line to tread between old-fashioned prescriptive usage and modern, constantly evolving usage, even when the modern forms are clearly based on some kind of misuage. The best example I can think of is “I could care less.” That always gets me: how could the user not realize what he/she is saying?

I’ve also noticed a increasingly common misuse of THEN meaning THAN, and often c oming from well-educated people who really should know better. Too frequently these days to be mere typos.

Perhaps one great boon to non-spellers would be to introduce the SCHWA as an actual letter of the English alphabet. Teachers could give students credit for correct spelling if the student can perceive that a particular vowel falls in an unstressed position. How that for the spelling reform proposal of the century?

Well, it’s still a fairly young century . . .

Cya!
Lilli.