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Chrise

Yes, at school we often discussed "misplaced adjectival clauses" My English teacher, My Higgins loved talking about them. He often mentioned "Sitting at the table was a lady with Queen Anne legs" and so on.

Was English your subject?

No, Chemistry, mostly (some Biology and some IT). However "all teachers are English teachers"!

I do a lot of proofreading.

jigjag

Yes, it galls me too, although this is probably another example of a change brought on by common usage.

ChrisE, jigjag and pedagogue...we must continue to fight against the dangly bits being put in the wrong place. The errors lead to an inelegant, flawed version of English. Common usage can alter the meaning/perceived meaning of a word or phrase, but there's more than that involved here!

Going forward, the clock is literally ticking as we continue to kick the can down the road towards the cliff edge

Thanks for reaching out to us, Tyke.

Malone

Your clever idea of using the * to indicate errors has got me thinking. You will recall that Tesco e-mailed Stevea6000 to get feed back on their Tesco's' idea. Why don’t you contact them to suggest they re-brand as Te’*s’*co’*s’*. They love gimmicks and this is highly original.

The re-branding of Sainsbury to Sainsbury’s is estimated to have cost the company £3m, so Tesco would pay you a huge fee for the idea. Actually the Sainsbury change was first suggested in a posting on this forum 2 or 3 years ago, on the PCT I think. So the company should make a contribution to the PU. We need to find the posting but as Tyke has pointed out, there are 25,000 of them. Can a few of us search them? Sorry, I can’t help. I have got to go shopping.

Jigjag

Although you might have a good, profitable idea, the thought of communicating with Tesco fills me with horror!

On the Tescos/Tesco's/Sainsburys theme, I watched a BBC drama earlier this week. One character had a bit more money than usual, and someone said to her 'Watch it, you'll be shopping in Marks's next'! It could, of course, have been 'Markses' like the earlier 'Bootses'.

I noticed a large new sign on a small building in town this morning


TAXI'S

Abbreviations & Acronyms

I understand why these are used in written work because it can get tedious when the longer version is repeated in the same article but it is annoying when the reader is assumed to know what obscure ones are and has to look them up.
Even worse is their use by radio/tv presenters etc when there is no need. A recent example was a BBC presenter who kept referring to the `World Wildlife Fund` as `double u double u eff`- this defeats the object of using abbrev`s and acronyms as it is longer and more difficult to say!