A change of pace today: some terrible photographs from my mobile phone of typographic errors I’ve noticed recently.

I follow the English FAIL blog, GrammarBlog and Apostrophe Abuse (which are all derivations of the FAIL Blog), which probably inspired me to take the photos in the first place. You can blame them.

The capturing of typos may seem to be a little snobbish, linguistically speaking, but it amuses me and that’s all the justice I need. Not that I am perfect myself (you could probably find many errors littered throughout this blog, if you were to take the time to peruse it) but then I’m not getting PAID to create words on a professional basis for somebody else.

I’ll start with a few abuses of the poor apostrophe, which is really getting fisted by the world.

The grocer’s apostrophe always makes me wonder how people thought it would help; it’s leaving it out that irritates rather than amuses. The first is from a church hall; the second is more worrisome because it is a notice for an art shop.

The following does The Double: the omitted apostrophe for the first word has been stolen by BBQ.

The next is a Spelling Fail; I do feel a little guilty for this, found in the window of a local pub, because it was for charity. However, charity doesn’t excuse complete stupidity.

The next is a WTF? from Westfield, the largest shopping centre in Europe (apparently). Obviously, not the deliberate reverse ‘s’ in the logo, but the lack of the word ‘be’ in a sentence of six words. Quite impressive.

The final is one that I’m surprised isn’t on any fail blog: I recommend people click on the six charity sites that are part of The Hunger Site, but they all have the same lack of basic English (and a preposition) in Step 3. I thought the irony was richest on The Literacy Site.

A return to normal waffling about comics, books, films and comedy tomorrow, now that I’ve got that out of my system.