Spelling Rant
The Grammar Guru spent fourteen hours this weekend tramping through various home improvement stores looking at cabinets, linoleum, floor tile, ceiling fans, countertops, lavatories (bathroom sinks, for you non-architectural types), and other stuff for her remodeling projects. And her feet are killing her. Those hard, concrete floors as not conducive to comfortable shopping experience. But when one shops at a warehouse-type place with forklifts everywhere, that’s what one must learn to tolerate.
So the Grammar Guru is standing at the checkout line at the Orange Box Warehouse Store, when her eye settles on a large sign covered with several paragraphs of verbiage. The Grammar Guru has never met a sign that she would not read, so she read this one, even though it was clearly intended for the store employees. It was instructions on how to check a shopping basket for “shrink items” (i.e., stuff a person is trying to steal) when a shopper sets off the alarms at the exit doors.
It was a good sign, well-written and easy to understand. Until one’s eyes reached the penultimate bullet point. It stated that saw blades and other “simular” objects could be hidden in rolled insulation. The Grammar Guru nearly fainted.
SIMULAR?! Please! The Grammar Guru is in despair. Even if the sign company received the order from the Orange Box with such an egregious mistake, they could have called the store manager and asked if they could correct the misspelling. But no, there it was, in 150-point type, for all the world to see. The failure of the modern educational system is hanging out in public, flapping in the breeze. If our teachers cannot even impart the correct spelling of a simple word like “SIMILAR,” then society is doomed. How can our modern educational system be expected to turn out productive and useful citizens if it cannot even teach simple spelling?
The Grammar Guru is going to lie down with a cold cloth on her forehead, to see if she can recover.