At the multiplex near our home, the movie previews and ad graphics are loud, slick, and in-your-face. Last week Husband and I saw The Queen at a small upstate theater, and before the movie began, the screen time was devoted to local advertisers. With no accompanying music or sound, giant business cards scrolled across the screen — Corner Pizza, Lakeview Landscaping, Main Street Plumbing — you get the idea. We watched in silence until a card for a general contractor appeared with the words “Attention to Detail, Expert Crastmanship.” Great attention to detail right there, making sure one of those misspelled business cards got put on a movie screen. This stuff makes me mental, typos seen by hordes of consumers going uncorrected forever. I nudged Husband and whispered, “Did you see that? Crastmanship? Do you know how many customers they’re losing giving out cards like that?” “None,” he replied, “because no one will notice but you.”
He said it sweet and polite, but I heard the implied “You’re a nut job” and I don’t know why, but misspelling and sloppy grammar in public places disturbs me more than reason can explain. I’ve always been a word nerd and grammar cop, and I often find myself biting my tongue to keep from announcing my observation and being identified as an anal retentive potty training flunk-out. Three years ago I sat in a prominent Manhattan hospital waiting for my father to finish a radiation treatment. On the wall in front of me was a sprawling, full-color framed poster advertising the superlative care patients receive at the hostipal I was wise enough to have chosen for treatment. All I could think was they charge $75 for an aspirin, but they couldn’t hire a proofreader to give this poster a once over before sending it off to the printer and plastering the hostipal with them. Looking back, it wasn’t such a bad thing. I was at that hospital a lot that year as my dying father fought lung cancer, and it began to bring me a measure of comfort that even though that poster had something really wrong with it, it still stayed on the wall. So I guess sometimes blessings come misspelled.
I’m taking a class right now taught by a much older, crotchety instructor who no doubt had moments of clarity in the past, but not the recent past. We are learning an entirely new language from him and he’s torturing us with English on the side. A couple of weeks ago we were going over the words ‘kneel’ and ‘knell’ in our textbook and he announced it was a typo since there’s no such word as knell. I raised my hand and said respectfully, “Knell is a word, sir. It means to signal something of doom or importance.” “No,” he answered annoyed, “you’re always trying to correct me when I know I’m right. There’s no such word as knell.” I kept giving him sentences using the word until he finally shouted, “All right! It may have something to do with a bell. Some famous quote. Something like don’t ask about why it knells.”
Just shoot me already. “It’s toll, sir. ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ is how the famous quote goes. You’re looking for toll, not knell. But knell is also a word.” He waved his hands over his head and went into a coughing fit, and we all took a break and walked into the hall to check our phone messages.
This week we covered the ‘p’ words like peak, peek, pique, and pike and how lots of people confuse them because they’re so similar. I don’t know which people, but he said there are lots of them. He sat behind his desk mopping up his nose and said, “Just remember the word pike means the top of a mountain.”
Here we go. “Pike isn’t the top of a mountain, sir, you’re thinking of peak. A peak is the top of a mountain.”
“You’re doing it again!” he squealed, “Correcting me when I’m right! A pike is the top of a mountain and I’ll prove it. Pike’s Peak!”
Oh, God, I’m growing a brain tumor in this room.
“Pike is the man the peak is named for, sir. That’s why it’s called Pike’s Peak. It’s the man’s name. The top is still the peak.”
“Then what’s a pike?” he demanded.
“Well, for one it’s a fish.”
“Are you Jewish?”
My mouth dropped open. The class fell silent.
“What did you just ask me?”
“Are you Jewish?” he yelled even louder. “Because they’re the only people who know what a pike is. It’s what they make gefilte fish from. Do you make gefilte fish?”
I must tell you I have not been asked many questions in my life that took my words away, but this one knocked me speechless. With no response to give, I looked around the room at the other students, and locked eyes with Keisha who looked at me like, “Oh shit, now he’s gonna notice I’m black.”
Rather than search for the village missing its idiot, I soldiered on.
“Pike can also mean a sharp stick, sir.”
“Like something you’d put in a vampire’s heart to kill him?”
“Well, most slayers use a stake, sir, but if a pike is all you have, I’m sure it will do.”
On to the q’s.