Common mispronunciations – do you make them?
WordSpin’s recent article about misspellings got readers’ attention. We’re glad you liked it. Now here’s a far more complicated topic: mispronunciations.
The most commonly mispelled English words
Did you notice the one in the title? Felt good to find it, didn’t it?
Spelling mistakes are one of those things. Find one, and you feel a sense of satisfaction and superiority. It might even make you laugh out loud! But make one yourself, and you feel silly, guilty or outright dumb. Could even make...
Just don’t hit Send
Sometimes you just wish you hadn’t. And with emails, we all wish we hadn’t fairly often. Here are some examples of emails that were sent before they were proofread*.
Bad product names
Our article on the process of naming provides some helpful hints on how to get naming right. But sometimes naming new products, brands and services can go horribly wrong. Here are some examples of names with unintended meanings, unpronounceable spellings or offensive connotations.
Playing the risky Mix ’n Match word game
Ah, bloopers. We may pretend not to notice them in the office, at the church or on the train – but we take them away with us and share them over and over with our friends and colleagues. Because there’s just nothing like someone else’s little mess up to brighten your day. Here are a few we’ve spotte...
Czech you're spelling
No one said English spelling was easy. There are far too many so-called rules, and even more exceptions. Nun of them seam to make any cents. Whoops, that should be: none of them seem to make any sense. See what we mean?
Where are your tender spots?
Bloopers can appear anywhere, in any country and in any written format. From cash machines to menus. Here are a choice few.
Christmas bloopers
There's nothing like a winter city break to get away from it all at Christmas. But what is this Czech tourist brochure trying to sell exactly? "Take one of our horse-drawn city tours - we guarantee no miscarriages!"
Translating native-language expressions into English
European companies sometimes make mistakes in their English-language advertisements and marketing texts, simply because they don't use native-English writers. Many of these problems just make the language more complicated than it needs to be. Others change the intention of the message so much that t...
"It's the difference between cutting out noise with a meat axe or a scalpel"
We often run across some gems like this! If only these companies had contacted Eye for Image, blunders like this one might have been avoided.
