Have you ever noticed...

It's becoming impossible to read books, magazines, and newspapers without finding both spelling and grammatical errors. I've also noticed many instances of incorrect word usage. There's increasing dependence on software for all aspects of editing and people don't seem to have vocabularies adequate to know when the wrong word is being used.

I know - it's awful! I always notice them. I was at TGI Friday's the other week and they have these big printed poster/photo collage sort of things on the walls - I'd imagine they're like mass-produced sheets of plastic-like wallpaper or something that they put up in all of the restaurants. Anyway, there was a word on it that was spelled wrong - it was an egregious error, too. I can't remember what it was at the moment, it was next to a picture of the Eiffel Tower, maybe it was like "Your pasport to cuisine" or something like that. It was dreadful! There are several others I see as well: Ceasar salad Free refill's Lot's of menu choices Your welcome to come again any time et cetera, et cetera... I also saw greeting cards somewhere that had awful errors, don't remember where it was. The invitation cards said "Your Invited" and the high school graduation cards said "Congradulations"; I was about to be sick.

This is truly the reason that machines can never replace humans. A computer software program cannot put a word into context, and I really fear that all the self-publishing will make the situation even worse. When you can find typos and grammar errors flooding magazines, newspapers, and books, imagine businesses without editors. They are absolutely essential. Nowadays people rely on spell checking, but this will not determine whether the sentence makes sense, uses the correct word, or even if you have an incorrect word if it is spelled correctly. Like most businesses, publishing has been suffering those drastic cuts in staffing to improve the bottom line (financial), so quality suffers. The worst menus are those in small local restaurants.

You'll find errors in many paper back novels you buy also.

Absolutely with you on this one. I notice spelling mistakes everywhere - television captions, on packaging, I even saw a spelling error printed on the side of a van. No-one seems to double check anything these days it seems to me. It doesn't annoy me though, I find it amusing - almost like a hobby - let's see how many mistakes I can spot today type of thing (yes I know, I'm sad!!!)