Examples of Bad Grammar
Typos have plagued us as a species pretty much ever since we started writing. Did you know that Chaucer once wrote a poem about how slipshod one of his scribes was? Even before typing and movable type existed, humanity was committing “typos”. And badly enough that the father of English poetry felt moved to write a poem about it. The poem is called “Unto Adam His OwnScriveyne” and chides the scribe in question for his “negligence and rape”, a word which at the time referred to haste or carelessness. Curiously, this was one of Chaucer’s favorite scribes, showing that even the best of us can make errors. This is but one example of historicaltypos. We have a list of many others for your enjoyment to show that people have been making the same errors for hundreds of years without grammar check English.
List of Historic Grammar Fails
Image credit: bigeducationape.blogspot.com
The grammar and spelling fails on this list went down in history!
Some of the oldest typos are in Bibles from the very beginning of history. Examples:
- “Though shalt commit adultery” provided a new take on the seventh commandment.
- Matthew 5:12 became “Rejoice and be exceedingly clad!” rather than glad.
- John 6, 68-9 became “We know that you ate the Holy one of God”, rather than are.
- Mark 7:27 became “Let the Children first be killed”, rather than filled.
The Washington Post, writing about President Wilson, once intended to write that he had been “entertaining” his future wife. Instead, they miswrote it so that he had been “entering” her.
When Queen Victoria traveled over the Menai Bridge in Wales, the London times reported “The Queen Herself pissed graciously over the magnificent edifice.”
The UN recently tweeted that they stress “urgency of reaching 1-state solution” in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In 1962, a NASA programmer made a typo – a missing hyphen – that caused Mariner 1 to go into the ocean instead of to Venus. That’s a pretty big detour.
On the other hand, some typos can be profitable. We could be typing googol.com if Sean Anderson hadn’t misspelled the word as google!
Finally, spinach’s reputation as an iron powerhouse was caused by Erich von Wolf’s mistaken printing of a decimal place. It contains 3.5 grams of iron – he wrote it as 35.
Avoid These Spelling Fails
These typos show us that anyone can fall victim to the perils of poor proofreading. Naturally, you want to avoid such things. But how can you do so? One way is to beat age-old problems with modern tech. We live in the computer age, one where it’s possible to access information that, fifty years ago, we could never have dreamed of having at our fingertips. You should take advantage of that!
One option is to learn lots of grammar. The internet makes it easy and cheap or even free to take grammar lessons, from a person or from an automated piece of software. There’s a limit to how much you can learn, of course, but a little bit is never a bad thing.
An online grammar checker is a great way to avoid typos, too. It’s automated, many of them are free, and it takes very little time. You can proofread your work in a few minutes at no cost to yourself. The checker does all the work, so all you have to do is decide whether that’s a mistake or whether you intended it that way. Any embarrassing typos will be gone.
How Examples of Bad Grammar Can Help
How can these examples of bad grammar actually help you? It’s simpler than you think! We’ve demonstrated that people have been making typos – or writingtypos, in some cases – pretty much since writing’s been around. In other words, proofreading has always been crucial and always will be. You can avoid grammar fails by being smarter, better-informed, and better-equipped than these writers with the help of best grammar exercises. Make use of the advantages offered to you by the computer age and become the grammar expert that your ancestors could never have been.
