Picture Time: When Grammar Eludes Professional Grade
Browsing through Facebook, one must often sort through and endure a constant barrage of poor grammar and misspellings. Generally we accept this (or I do) as one of the pitfalls in our present digital age. Everything is instant, quantity is more important than quality, and getting a Like and a Share means a lot to some people.
But I expect more from the advertisements I’m forced to view than I do from the common man, especially when precision is part of the ad copy.
Look what I found today, when a GMC ad auto-played (an obnoxious feature for a different article) with captions, since I had my computer on mute.
See the problem? Someone at GMC’s ad company thinks the plural of conductor is conductor is. And they didn’t stop there.
Because the plural of maestro (which is not a proper noun) is Maestro is.
Now am I nitpicking? Possibly. But it matters a lot to people who rely solely on captions or the written word to receive information. I expect just a bit more precision from a company attempting to sell product on that virtue.
[Images captured via Facebook]
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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I watch this commercial for the new Acadia many times and every time I see it, I laugh! I happen to know a conductor and he drives around in a company S Class sedan.
Sh!t like that practically leaps off the page or screen at me, even as my spelling has worsened with age. (I second-guess myself even more, and my first instinct is usually correct.) I especially go ape-feces over captions on TV news that use the incorrect spelling of a word (role/roll, and the like -- is that a "homophone," B&B)? A friend's refrigerator magnet describes me best: "I'm the grammar snob about whom your mother warned you!" ;-)