The best observational comedy is really about stuff that you knew all the time, but it took somebody else to point it out to you. That’s why Peter Kay (for Northerners) and Michael McIntyre (for Southerners) are so incredibly amusing – they don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, they just point it out to us in a way that makes us notice how common, and often absurd, it is. I had such a ‘moment of clarity’ today when reading a Language Log post about Muphry’s Law, the extension of the engineering principle Murphy’s Law into the world of the written word. Muphry’s law, as Language Log say, was set out in 1992 by John Bangsund:
Muphry’s Law is the editorial application of the better-known Murphy’s Law. Muphry’s Law dictates that (a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; (d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.
Oh the amount of times I have wished for an undo, or an ‘edit comment’, while posting around the blogosphere. Back in the heady old days of the Webcameron Open Blog, where I cut my blogging teeth, you might say, I came a-cropper of this principle more times than I could bear.
The bottom line really, I suppose, is to just ignore other peeple’s spelling and grammatical errors, when you see them. In correcting others, you might make a mistake you hadn’t thought of.
Tizzy
July 23rd, 2008 | 12:25 am
Private Eye have a glorious Ped’ants Corner. For months, the pedants couldn’t agree where the apostrophe should be placed, if at all.
I seem to remember we had a mild to-do on whether words such as hotel should be preceded by ‘an’ or ‘a’. I’m still a fan of the Oxford comma.
Ahhh, Webcameron. Indeed.
Stu
July 23rd, 2008 | 9:53 am
I think forms such as ‘an history’ or ‘an hotel’ sound clunky, and promote the dropping of the initial ‘h’ – in the style of the American pronunciation of ‘herbs’. It also contravenes the grammatical rule that words beginning with consonants be preceded by ‘a’, although breaking an English grammatical rule is not really a big deal, I suppose, seeing as they’re generally inconsistent within correct grammar.
Why, if we considered ‘an heavy object’ as correct English, would ‘an yellow object’ be incorrect?
As for the Oxford comma, I am Oxford comma agnostic. In general I try and avoid it, but it fits readily with the rhythm of my speech so I often use it without conscious intent.
Tizzy
July 23rd, 2008 | 4:22 pm
Blame the French, I normally do. As the following article indicates, you are more right than me: http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/words/ananda.html
My English teachers put a big red cross through ‘a hysteric…’ or similar, so the habit will be hard to break, I’m afraid. I don’t think it likely I’ll write ‘a honest MP’ or ‘a hour before Dr Who’. Of course, these are examples of words with an unaspirated h – oh what the heck.
The pronunciation of ‘h’ is another thorny subject…