Midnight Musings

Poor grammar. Bad spelling. Incomplete sentences. One expects this from children but not from adults and certainly not from the media. (What planet am *I* from??) It shouldn't but it bothers me when I see misspellings in magazines and on CNN and hear actors playing highly educated characters using idioms incorrectly and saying "I" when they should say "me". I know it's because of the whole "you and I" fiasco but wrong is wrong. And what about these commercials that one would think have to pass through a panel of some kind for final approval before reaching our television sets? Hotels.com is one of the moment. A nicely-dressed woman holding the end of a measuring tape marches purposefully up a flight of steps, stoops to touch the tape to the walkway of her destination point and then releases it. Watching the tape make its way back through the city to its point of origin is cute, I'll grant you, but unless she communicated telepathically with the doorman holding the other end of the tape as to when she reached her destination, how did she know how far she'd walked when the doorman was the only one who could determine that???
My all-time favorite is an old car commercial. A motivational speaker is motivating away in front of his audience and then says, "Now, I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you're driving...THIS!" The television audience presumably sees the film he motions towards of a car hugging the curves of a mountain road but...did he or did he not just tell the nice people to close their eyes? What exactly were they supposed to be imagining? Airforce One? The batmobile? A sampan? A surrey? (Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry.) How did these things get past every single person who reviewed them? Am I the only person who cares? Here's a quarter - call me.