Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks

Example:

bq. A sign at the swimming pool at Reed College in Portland, OR asks you to:
Please “shower” before entering the pool.
Maybe they knew that no one bothers with more than a quick rinse.
I hope they don’t get a summons from the Board of “Health.”

bq. I got this “auto”-reply e-mail from Bizrate.com:
Just responding to let you know that a “human” reads each and every comment to BizRate.com!
Great! I feel much “better” knowing that.
Me too. Here I was thinking the e-mail was handled by some kind of robot.

The Observer has an article on authors who have praised their own works on amazon.com.

Amazon reviews can be weird. I recently read one praising the Oxford Style Manual, with two or three spelling mistakes in it. My favourite was a student at a British university who praised his professor’s book on criminal law saying he slept with it under his pillow (perhaps this was written by the professor himself?).

Here it is:

bq. Reviewer: (lwa98rcl@shef.ac.uk) from Probably the best university in the world
Once again Mr Jefferson of the acclaimed law department within the University of Sheffield has produced a work of unsurpassable quality. Rarely has a book of such accessibility and depth of reasoning been available to undergraduates. Jefferson uses his inimitable writing style to maximum effect, sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking but always lightning quick and razor sharp. Readers will feel priviledged to have read this book. I keep mine under the pillow.

(0 out of 3 people found the review helpful)

The book, Criminal Law by Michael Jefferson, is in its sixth edition and has a picture of Dixon of Dock Green, a 1950s/1960s TV policeman, on the cover.
Apparently it was amazon’s Canadian site that revealed the reviewers’ real identities.

There can be even more value in amazon reviews:

bq. [Lisa] Jardine, a former chairwoman of the Man Booker Prize judging panel, added: ‘In America, Amazon review-watching is a sport. There have been some fantastic indiscretions. One ex-wife of an American author put the history of his infidelities in her review of his book. It was breathtaking.’

In a discussion about the House of Commons on FLEFO (CompuServe), Mike Ellis mentioned this general brochure (G7), Some Traditions and Customs of the House. It’s an excellent collection of trivia:

bq. In general, the description used is “the Honourable Member for . . .”. However, Privy Councillors (senior Ministers, past or present, and other senior Members) are “the Right Honourable Member for … “. Less frequently heard these days are “the Noble Lord, the Member for … “, which is used for a Member with a courtesy title (e.g. the son of a duke, marquess or earl) who sits in the House of Commons, or an Irish peer, “the Honourable Baronet for … “. Following recommendations made by the Modernisation Committee the House agreed that some of the embellishments which are added to the standard form of address, such as “gallant” (used for Members who have been commissioned officers in the forces) and “learned” (used for Members who are senior barristers) should be abandoned. Often the constituency is omitted, and a Member will be described as “the Honourable Member who spoke last”, “the Right Honourable Lady opposite”, “the Honourable Member below the gangway”, etc. In most cases Hansard will expand these phrases into the form “the Honourable Member for Ockendon (Mr Bloggs)” in order to avoid ambiguity in the printed record of debates. …

bq. Members may speak only if called by the Chair. They are called by name, and must sit down if the Speaker rises to his or her feet (e.g. to call for order, or to interrupt the debate). To catch the Speaker’s eye, Members commonly rise or half-rise from their seats, but if they are not called, they have no redress.

This is some general knowledge that would have helped a German law student whose dissertation I was reading recently. The topic was the change of style in judicial decisions in England, France and Germany. She refers to the form of address in the House of Lords: ‘my noble and learned friend Lord …’, and concludes that this is not a mere convention but shows genuine respect for a fellow-judge – proved by the generally respectful tone:

bq. Dass es sich dabei nicht allein um eine zu bloßer Konvention erstarrte Höflichkeitsfloskel handelt, sondern um einen Ausdruck der tatsächlichen Wertschätzung des Fachkollegen, bezeugt der ganz generell festzustellende respektvolle Umgangston.

(Jutta Lashöfer, Zum Stilwandel in richterlichen Entscheidungen, 1992 ISBN 3-89325-124-3 or 0932-4763 – quite an interesting book).

Of course, noble = a Lord, and learned = a lawyer, so the phrase is absolutely conventional.

The Guardian (which used to be the Manchester Guardian, at least when I was at school) has its 1928 style guide online as a PDF file. The yellowing pages have been scanned.

Sections include Parliamentary (how to punctuate ‘Hear, hear!’ – I associate this more with The Times than The Guardian; Irish Free State parliament; word division; cricket; football; household servants (Cook general, housemaid, kitchen-maid, housemaid waitress, between-maid, house parlour-maid, nursery maid, children’s maid); and foreign and Welsh publications.

At www.canoo.net there are a number of sources for learners of German, or for those who want to check their German spelling quickly.

The site is in either English or German.
Es gibt englische und deutsche Seiten.

If you click on Dictionaries, you get a search field and a field with a pull-down menu. There you can search on all dictionaries, or select one, including spelling, word formation, and DE>EN LEO, the IT department dictionary at Munich University. For instance, enter ‘Groß’ in the inflection dictionary and you are shown every inflection on the screen.

Klicken Sie auf “Wörterbücher” und suchen Sie entweder in allen Wörterbüchern gleichzeitig (LEO DE>EN von www.leo.org ist auch dabei, es ist gelinkt) oder in nur einem.

CELEX kostenlos für alle EU-Bürger ab 1. Juli 2004.

I had a CELEX subscription for researching EU documents online as I’d been doing some translation for the European Court of Justice. It’s now been cancelled. I received a letter from Luxembourg by registered post:

bq. Please be informed that the Publications Office has decided to cancel your CELEX acces [sic] contract effective 20 June 2004. This decision follows the European Parliament Resolution of 19 December 2002, asking for free access to CELEX to all European citizens.
From 1 July 2004, CELEX will be available free of charge at the following Internet address:
http://europa.eu.int/celex

I can’t help feeling it will be available free to non-EU citizens as well.