Yup, I love them...sometimes they are confusing, sometimes enlightening and sometimes amusing. ;D

Take for instance, the word cancel. Now let's put it in the past tense- canceled...and yes, cancelled.

Why is Cloudy talking about this, you may be asking yourself as you read this post. Or perhaps you're thinking 'Hmm, Cloudy's a few bricks short of a load today' or maybe you're just thinking ' Ah yes, a vegemite sandwich is just what I need', but then I digress.....

This morning my boss came in and told me to take down a note I'd done to cancel a woman's office hours yesterday because somone had scrawled a correction all over it. I had spelled 'canceled' and they corrected it to the version with two l's.

Indignant I was. Yes. Indigant I became...err, indignant, not yoda-like... LOL :D Oh, and motivated to prove I was not illiterate since the boss had added, as she told me to fix the sign, "It's embarassing to have it be wrong and be corrected on the sign!"

So I hauled out my American Heritage, College edition dictionary and showed her that BOTH versions are, in fact, correct but the one I used is the first one listed in the dictionary and thus, I believe, the more widely used/accepted. I used to spell it with two l's and had someone tell me that was wrong and I discovered this little fact some time ago, but wanted to have something in hand to show the boss.

LOL, she got all indignant about the person defacing our sign when I was actually NOT spelling it wrong so she made up a sign of her own with the definition and both spelling options from an online dictionary and enlarged the text to fill a page, then added a line on the bottom saying that both versions were correct so please don't grafitti up our signs in the future. She highlighted things and posted it on our mailroom door for the mad-spelling nut to see. She thinks she knows which of our people did it and wants them to stop making extra work for me... LOL, plus I think it gave her some pure pleasure to toss it back in the person's face because they tend to be extraordinarily controlling and anal. ;)

[ 11-02-2005, 10:02 AM: Message edited by: Cloudbringer ]

I believe "cancelled" is the proper British spelling, and "canceled" used more frequently in the US. Or at least that's what my dictionary says.

Until recently, I'd always used the second version, myself, Groj so I'm guessing it might be the British variant as for some reason unknown to me, I used to invariably choose that version if two existed. :D My American Heritage dictionary didn't specify that origin, though, so I'm not sure and didn't look anyplace else.. LOL but the boss got her info from an online Dictionary, probably dictionary.com or the like. [img]smile.gif[/img]

In any event, they are both correct usage, at least as far as our dictionaries are concerned! :D Which is why my boss got such a kick out of my showing it to her. She got to zing the guy who's been messing with all our signs!

[ 11-02-2005, 10:12 AM: Message edited by: Cloudbringer ]

That sounds right. (Or should I say looks right [img]tongue.gif[/img] )

LOL! Few things are more enjoyable than throwing that holier-than-thou correction back in someone's face! [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

That is right. We always spell it 'cancelled'. There are many british people who get excessively uptight about 'american english', one of which probably edited your sign. The only time I am ever slightly peeved is if the language is labelled 'american', which has been a choice in many an install...

Still, there are worse signs about, grammatically speaking. I've seen a few names painted onto shops and trucks with errors, usually involving apostrophes.

I think I've said this before, but I had a seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher who had a few hard and fast rules. One was that if you ever misspelled the word "its" (or "it's"), you automatically got an F on that paper, no matter what it was.

My personal favorite... those who confuse "complementary" and "complimentary". The first means something that goes well with another... like the complementary floor mats with your new car. The second means "FREE".... :D

I've had to beat on people at my company who tried to announce our complimentary training classes... awful hard to make money that way, it is ;)

Yes, but they go so well with your clients! [img]graemlins/heee.gif[/img]

One that makes me cringe is "supposedtively".

Ack! I keep wanting to thump my co-worker and tell her it's "supposedly"!

I don't even know where her version comes from, never heard it before she started using it.

Grrr.. just had a bit of a to do with the guy who's been changing the signs. He demanded a dictionary and I asked what for. He wanted to check the word cancel(l)ed. I informed him that I had already done so and it was correct in both versions. He demanded to see the dictionary for himself...afraid I lost it at that point. He'd been in my face, saying it was wrong and I was wrong, that the one l version is not right...etc...and I mean IN my face, like 5 inches away. So I told the guy I was really aggravated at having to do extra work and make new signs when he wrote on them and he then demanded to see the dictionary for himself. That's when I asked why he was calling me a liar. LOL He stopped short, said he wasn't and when I pointed out that by demanding to see it for himself after I'd already told him that I checked it, and had showed it to my boss, he was, in effect, calling me a liar or at the very least saying I either couldn't read a dictionary or was totally incompetent! He backed off and said nevermind but wasn't happy.

[ 11-03-2005, 03:53 PM: Message edited by: Cloudbringer ]