My morning snark

[telophase]

From the campus announcement email:

Factory Honda Fit Rims for sell... great Deal! -- Submitted by: [email redacted to protect the IDIOTIC]

Honda Fit Rims available for sell. MSRP $396.28, half off!!!

SELL is a verb! You SELL objects! When you are selling at object, it is FOR SALE! There is NO SUCH THING as "FOR SELL". You are ATTENDING COLLEGE and should have learned that by now!

We are overlooking the inappropriate capitalization in the headline. For now.

Comments

[riofriotex.livejournal.com]

Ah, spell check at work again. Hey, the computer didn't flag it as misspelled, so it's gotta be right....right? :)

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

It may be an accent problem--for example, in some versions of the Arkansas accent, "sale" and "sell" are homophones, so people sometimes type one when they mean the other. It always drove me batty anyway, though.

(And then there's the time when, shortly after I moved to Arkansas, I was startled to hear a kid yell "Hey! There's hell outside!" ... yeah. Hail.)

Then again, I also see that mistake a lot with non-native speakers who haven't mastered the range of "for sale/to sell," and people who just have no excuse that I can see whatsoever, except that they somehow don't ever read anything that anyone else writes. Gah.

Also, is it just me or are "on sale" and "for sale" different things? Seriously, is it just my dialect? To me, if it's "on sale" it had better have a discount, and not merely be available for purchase.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

"On sale" and "for sale" are different things to me, too.

[riofriotex.livejournal.com]

They may very well be homophones in some dialects, but that's no excuse - sale is a noun and sell is a verb.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

If it makes you feel better, you can simply assume that the notice was posted by a cat.

That doesn't entirely solve the problem, of course. It just shifts the error to the first word, which should then be spelled Faktry. Or Factree. But it might amuse you anyway. :-)