TV Commercials with Bad Grammar – four heard in one day!

Television commercials are created by advertizing firms.  Presumably, the writers are grammar-adept.  The following examples show that they are not. 

Borden Milk:  “Here’s to kids that follow their hearts.”

Kids are people, not objects!  “…who follow their hearts.”

 Comfy Control Harness:  “Dogs are now begging to go for a walk, because now there’s the amazing mesh Comfy Control Harness that puts a smile on their face.”

For many reasons, this is a badly written sentence.  Most irksome to me is the number-disagreement between the dogs and the body part mentioned.  Do all these dogs share one face?  Certainly not.  “…a smile on their faces.”

 T-Mobile:  “Everyone’s going to want this in their stocking.”

This is another sentence exhibiting a numerical mismatch.  “Everyone” is singular; “their” is plural.  To fix this, one might change it to “Everyone’s going to want this in his or her stocking.”  It might be better, though, to remove “everyone,” and change the subject.  For example:” Your kids are going to want this in their stocking.”  But, oops! This requires another correction.  Do all the kids share the same stocking? I hope not! 

“Your kids are going to want this in their stockings.”

Motorola Droid phone:  “This droid is too powerful to fall in the wrong hands.”

If this vigorous phone is hopping about on someone’s palms, and it then falls over, the sentence makes sense.  But I doubt that this is the intended meaning. 

“This droid is too powerful to fall into the wrong hands.”

May I order some "American English?"

This complaint is not about a poorly written television script, but I couldn’t resist a departure from that topic.  A short segment on the local news last evening told of a North Carolina restaurant owner who had posted a sign forbidding service to those who do not speak English.

The shameless boldness of the proprietor is stunning enough.  His obtuseness is made worse by his display of ignorance of foreign languages and his own so-called “American English.”

The sign attempts to tell customers, in six languages, that they are not welcome if they don’t speak English.  Two of the languages, Russian and Irish Gaelic, I don’t know enough about to critique the restaurant owner’s rendering of them.  However, here are the attempts to inform speakers of French, German, Spanish, and “American,” with his helpful parenthetic explanations:

N parler français, pas de service.

(French)

Kein Deutsch sprechen.  Kein service.

(German)

No hablar español.  Sin servicio.

(Spanish)

Wrong, wrong, wrong!  That the printed texts utilize the cedilla and the tilde (Also, the Russian text appears in Cyrillic characters.) leads me to assume that the sign maker used an online translator—Not a reliable translation method.

            But here is the best: 

No speak English.  No Service

(American English)

The restaurant owner has now removed the sign, after much criticism.  He says that he posted it in frustration after a group of Spanish-speaking patrons had difficulty ordering.  We don’t expect the guy to have a translator on staff, but at least he could get a better command of his own language!

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/03/16/speak-english-service-sign-removed-north-carolina-restaurant/