The Good Oil: Living in Australia as an Expat

I admit that I’m a bit of a spelling and grammar nazi (and that my own standard of English is far from perfect). I just like to see decent English, that’s all; blatant spelling and grammar errors make me cringe. It’s bad enough when you see the odd greengrocer writing “apples” as “apple’s”, but really, there’s no excuse for this:

This is taken from a large (half-page) advert on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, a large, national Australian newspaper. You would have thought that a company that has created, and spends large sums of money marketing, an anti-allergy treatment would at least make sure they were spelling “allergies” correctly. Particularly when the word in question stands two inches high on the page. Failing that, you’d think that someone in the newspaper’s advertising department would pick up on such a blatant cock-up. It’s not as though Photoshop, InDesign et al don’t have built-in spell checkers.

This is only one of countless blatant errors that I frequently see here. There’s even an apartment block nearby whose name – lovingly created in wrought iron on the side of the building, so it’s not like they haven’t had time to think about it – is spelled “The Oak’s”. (Maybe the building belongs to a person called “The Oak”, I dunno.)

Is the standard of spelling and grammar worse here than in the UK? It seems so, to me. But then it’s been five years since I’ve lived in the UK; maybe standards have dropped there too. Or maybe I’m just becoming more sensitive to these things over time. Or maybe I’m just a whinging Pom. 😉

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 12:25 am and is filed under Whinging Pom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.