Title of email sent to everyone in the office: “Intranet unavailable 1-2pm today!!!!”
Can we discuss this? Is there any item of news which conceivably requires four exclamation marks? If there were, would it be that the intranet is unavailable at lunch time? Weighty matters.
In other work related matters, I had a long phone conversation with a colleague today. In the course of this, I was continually distracted by small errors he made.
“This was muted [mooted] for later in the year”. “The board will take their clue [cue] from the chair”. After a while, I began to wonder whether he was doing it on purpose to leaven the boredom of our conversation. Do you think that’s possible or am I just indulging in paranoia?
I used to work with a guy (a highly paid consultant as it happens) who used the word ‘decimate’ freely without the least clue what it meant. Not just not knowing the formal meaning of ‘executing one in ten’ but not knowing the common meaning of ‘devastate’ either – he just used it pretty much anywhere a verb might go. It got quite hard not to giggle in meetings.
oh, and I have just remembered what I meant to say in my comment – there was an article in the Guardian recently saying it’s now okay even for purists to use exclamation marks in emails, although I think you’re still supposed to confine yourself to just the one.
Overheard a woman speaking of her mortar and pedestal
And my aunt showing off with her one and only sophisticated French proverb used to say “c’est l’éléphant qui fait la musique” instead of “c’est le ton qui fait la musique”.
To quote Thoreau: “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”
To quote Emerson: “One ‘simplify’ would have sufficed.”
seems these posts please the target audience!
This made me laugh. Sounds terribly like me. Is it really dreadful that I correct my husband’s text messages for spelling and grammatical errors? He has “spelling fascist” on speed dial….