The longer I read comics, the harder it gets for me to recommend them for children. When I was a lad, they were perfectly acceptable reading material, but lately it seems like every Wednesday brings with it some abominable horror show that I would never want my kid to see. Just the other day, for example, I was reading a Marvel comic– not an Icon book, mind you, but one of the “mainstream” vanilla ones marketed in Borders stores and supermarkets all over town where anyone’s kid sister or minister or pet groomer could see them– and right there on the first page was a double negative.
I know! Right there on the first page! Imagine if a book like that were to fall into impressionable hands. Lives have been ruined by less.
I might be imagining it, but what was an occasional anomalous blip on the radar a few years ago now seems to be a steady stream. Cases won’t agree. Tenses won’t agree. Random letters routinely go missing from words entirely. Then, this weekend, I was reading a preview of something and one of the characters shouted, “Wa-la!”
Wa-frickin’-la? Sir, did you by any chance mean “voilà“?
“Wa-la” is only the latest gasket blower I never knew I had. I see way, way more of “alright” than I ever wanted to see. (The first time you see “alwrong” somewhere, you let me know.) Every time I see “orientate” appear in a dictionary like it’s a thing, three grams of life force ebb from my body. (The definition of “orientate,” by the way, is listed as “to orient.” Think about that for three seconds, America. The backspace key is usually in the upper right corner.) I thought “orientate” would always be the alpha peeve in my peeve menagerie, but I think “wa-la” might be a contender. It easily unseats people who pronounce Professor X’s name “eggzavier.” (Have you ever heard of anyone playing the eggzylophone? Is your racist uncle eggzenophobic? Thinking caps on, my friends, for the good of my throbbing temples.)
For some reason, it doesn’t bother me as much when I see errors in the indie books. Whatever may actually be happening over at Image Comics, I know nothing about the industry’s workings and only have a half-formed picture in my head of Robert Kirkman finishing the whole book alone in his house, tying it to the leg of a falcon and crying, “To Berkeley, Yragorne!” At Marvel, though, you know at least half a dozen people saw that text. Besides the writer, there’s some kind of editor in the mix. There’s the guy who did the lettering and probably stared intently at the error for the better part of a morning. The penciller saw the script at some point. I’m sure there was a lawyer in there somewhere. (These are American companies, after all.) Yet there it is on your stack: the “their” that’s supposed to be a “there,” in the middle of the page with its feet up on the coffee table like it runs the place.
I’m normally more of a pissant than a pedant, and of course I’m making a little much of this for a change. It is probably unlikely that a double negative in a comic will directly ruin anyone’s life. It really shouldn’t even bother me at all, since college filled my fool head with notions about language that directly contradict everything I just wrote. You see, I used to be a Russian speaker, back when I actually had people to speak to and atrophy had not whittled my vocabulary down to “Мой русский язык очень плохо. извините, пожалуйста.” (“My Russian very bad. Excuse me, please.”) My mentor at the time taught us not to psyche ourselves out and get hung up on things like noun declension and instrumental case, saying, “The purpose of language is communication.” In other words, if I say something and you understand what I meant, then who cares where in the sentence the preposition is?
I really took this theory to heart, especially when it was keeping my yankee ass from flunking Russian. When I see these grammatical Hindenburgs, I do try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
“This writer’s a smart, talented guy. Maybe ‘wa-la’ is meant to indicate to me that the character isn’t all that bright…. Oh, you know what he meant, professor. Relax.”
But then the double negative comes spilling out of Norman Osborne’s ridged cranium, and all my high-minded communication theory takes a left turn on the Cranky Parkway. It’s one thing when the Rhino talks like a mook, but if you’re trying to write a smart guy, make sure he actually sounds smart.
Like I said, lives aren’t in the balance. Still, if there is one story I have read in the last five years more than “comics are dyyyyying,” it’s “librarians are getting kids to read with comics,” and sometimes when I read that story I can’t help thinking, “Oh, no.”
When I was in grade school, my parents’ attitude towards comics could more or less be summarized as, “At least he’s reading, even if it’s garbage.” Even if I was spending hours each week reading about Canadians fighting ninjas with knife-hands, though, I was still the school spelling bee champ two years running. If you’re trying to pick up some vocab words, you could do a lot worse than watching Doctor Doom bloviate for a couple of pages. I’m not sure how I’d be doing if I were in junior high today.
(Note: any particularly ironic mistakes in this article were meant as jokes. And it’s my editor’s fault. And I was just writing conversationally. And I’m dumb now from reading so many comics.)
Jim Mroczkowski lives in the most decadent, glittering glass house you have ever seen. Rocks may be hurled in the direction of Twitter or Jimski.com.
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My my looks like some one is full of piss and vinger today. Great article as always.
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
(or, I’m more afraid of what the internet is doing to grammar than anything else.)
Great article. When I catch myself committing crimes to language, I sometimes want to rines my hands out with soap. For some reason I don’t feel as punished when I do that…
Guilty for "Eggzavier"
I don’t think I have ever noticed a grammatical error in a comic I’ve read unless it was intentional, but now I’m sure I’m going to be seeing them everywhere, great article though!
@rustyautoparts: that made my day, thank you
Even Patrick Stewart is guilty! "Why don’t you know how to say your own name?!"
Also annoying: Lando Calrissian doesn’t know how to pronounce "Han." Or maybe Han was like that guy who you knew as Andy in high school but told everyone at college he was Andrew. "Oh, sure, now it’s ‘Hahhhn,’ but back when I knew him it rhymed with ‘ban.’"
My pet peeve: "Irregardless"
Seriously?
@stuclach – I hear you. One of my peeves has to be "supposably." I wince everytime.
My topper: "As" means "per" so if you say "as per" you are actually saying "per per" and that’s just stupid.
Yeah there’s the argument that "People speak that way. People don’t always speak with perfect grammer, diction, etc". And that’s valid. But it shouldn’t be unintentional. The writer and the reader should be aware of the mistakes, if the errors are going to have a point to them. And, besides that, do we really want to read only about people who’re prone to ignorant statements or statements with many logical/grammatic problems?
Good article. As far as comic writing goes, cliches, bromides and readymade phrases bug me a lot more than lapses of spelling or grammar.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is the biggest complaint I’ve had about comics of late, and sometimes I wish I could offer my services to Marvel as an unpaid, volunteer copy editor. The number of mistakes I’ve seen in recent months is astounding.
(Also, I knew I would love this article when the title alone made me twitch. Excellent piece.)
Jimski, love the article, but I gotta tell you, my pet peeve is people with grammar pet peeves. Yes, as an editor, i ought to care about the difference between their, there, and they’re… and I do. it’s my job to care. But once something gets to press, once the email has been sent Reply All, once the gravestone has been engraved, then I’m a big fan of not worrying about it too much. These gaffs are a testament to our human frailties, weaknesses, and inability to put letters in the right order.
You want to see writers with an inherent disrespect for spelling and punctuation? Read some 16th century English texts. Or the American modernists. Or anything Scottish. Ok, I admit, there’s a fundamental difference between a conscious attempt to undermine and subvert grammar rules and complete disregard or unawareness of said rules. But I also know that there are people with great thoughts bopping around in their heads that are truly unable to distinguish between it’s and its.
I have a friend who asks me to edit his writing, and he makes every common grammar mistake in the book. It’s not sloppiness. It’s much too consistent for that. I’ve come to believe that it’s actually a disability. And that doesn’t take away from the brilliance of his thoughts and complex ideas. Well, for many readers it would. Which is why he has me fix it. Which is what editors do. Most of the time.
@patio I don’t think Jimski is criticizing the writers — who, as you said, are human and frequentlly capable of mistakes. He’s criticizing all the other pairs of eyes who clearly saw these same mistakes and let them see print. It’s unprofessional to let so many mistakes slip through the cracks, and while the writers’ ideas are still just as good, the overall quality of the art suffers if the editors aren’t also doing their jobs.
Jimski maimed two librarians by throwing a copy of On The Road once.
Yeah, it’s often occurred to me that the editorial process at comic book companies is all big picture, so they can’t be bothered with little things like proofreading. In a couple of issues of Secret Invasion, helicarrier was spelled hellicarrier on the recap page, which for some reason amused me far more than when such errors occur in a spot on the actual pages of the comic. I guess I think of the recap pages as the easiest to fix if you actually cared to.
@bansidhewall Recap pages are the worst offenders. I have literally had to read sentences on certain recap pages three times before they made any sense, because the grammar was so poor.
I’m with throughthebrush on this one. The first thing that comes to mind when I see a spelling or grammatical error in an issue isn’t, "huh, what an idiot <fill in the blank with author of choice> is". It’s how many other people managed not to catch it, especially since I did on first viewing.
Can we please retire "really" as a valid adverb? I’ve never read a asentence that was more convincing or should I say "really" convincing as a result of the use "really". I really mean that.
Part of the problem is that people are taught that simpliicity is a stylystic choice. It’s not. Simplicity is correct.
To return to the topic at hand, I think most editors are concerned with deadlines.Who cares if the book uses the wrong case as long as hits the printers on time? I’m sure if time is a luxury quality can beimped. If not, the deadline is king.
As a person with an English degree, I’ve found it is my sacred duty to leap off the couch and chortle with glee, pointing at every typo I can find. Truth be told, I noticed the typos in this article long before I grasped the irony.
But then again, I use too many commas. Everybody has their problems.
Great article, Jimski. As a Latin/English teacher, I can’t help but notice all those errors. I especially hate the "there/their" and "its/it’s" errors. However, I have one point in your article:
Canadians fighting ninjas with knife-hands
Now, do you mean the ninjas had knife-hands? Or do the Canadians have knife-hands? Or are the Canadians fighting the ninjas by means of knife-hands? Your construction does not make it clear, muddying the image. Clarity, Jimski, clarity! 😉
Hear hear Jimski. Great article. I identify with your lament to its fullest. My grammar and spelling nazism has gotten me in more trouble than it’s worth, but I still can’t stop myself from correcting people. Comics do provide a great example for the correct use of adverbs, though.
Me: "Hey how did the Eagles do on Sunday?"
Friend: "They did pretty good."
Me: "You mean they did well."
Friend: "What?"
Me: "They didn’t do good unless they stopped a crime during the game. Spider-Man does good. He’s a ‘do-gooder’. The Eagles did well"
Friend: "You’re a jackass."
Son of a bitch! I left out a period. Damn it!
Wala is a word in Arabic… They’re teaching multiple languages in one book.
@DaveCarr — Simplicity is correct? DON’T YOU LIKE JOYCE??? Okay, sorry, that’s another topic.
I do agree that there’s some lousy copy editing going on in comics, though I also think it’s fair to note that I see this in books, magazines, and newspapers as well. It has to be pretty bad to take me out of the story, though for context I taught college freshman writing for 5 years, which makes me more or less unshockable.
As long as we’re registering pet peeves, though, I have to mention that I’ve seen multiple times in comic books, where a speech balloon included a literary quotation — a quotation that I recognized — that was mangled so as to make no sense. I’m assuming that anybody who would bother to quote T.S. Eliot in a comic book would bother to get the words right, so I have to assume that some copy editor somewhere did not recognize what they were looking as as poetry and proceeded to "fix" it. Why they can catch THAT and not a double negative, I have no idea.
I just have to conclude with my fond memory of the Civil War promo cards Marvel put out with the text "Who’s side are you on?" Whose indeed. . .
If I haven’t really noticed any errors does it mean…
1) My grammar is just as poor, so I think what I’m reading is correct.
2) The comics I read are error free, meaning that they are superior to what Jimski reads
3) I’m blind.
@Neb I know you’re being facetious, and as a teacher you’re probably aware of how this works, but I think it’s an interesting topic: different kinds of errors ping differently for different people, and the way it affects you depends on the context. It also depends on whether you’re a visual or aural learner (I’m very sound-oriented, so I will literally never notice a homophone problem in my own writing unless someone points it out to me; it doesn’t mean I can’t read, it means I’m ‘hearing’ the words rather than looking at them). But obviously, there are people who are good at catching this stuff, they’re presumably paid to do so, and it would be nice if that happened.
@Neb – in Y: The Last Man TP #1 the soldier says "Gevarim" instead of "Gvarim".
Being French, "Wa-La", "Viola", "Voyla" and all other incarnations are amusing. Also, "rouge" is what ladies of the night wear on their face and nothing remotely involved with supervillainy.
Also Jim, I love how you’re constantly linking back to the same article about comics sales.
*This post was edited 28 times before I clicked submit. Here goes nothing.*
As a trained editor and holder of an English degree, this really grinds my gears to the point where I almost accept alright instead of all right.
The other one that always threw reporters was its and it’s. Really easy way to get that one, folks.
Look, I’ll take the point: editors should catch these things. Heck, a good letterer could catch typos and grammar errors (or introduce them). But, and not to be an apologist here but honestly it’s true, with the volume of product that the major publishers are putting out on a weekly basis, I think they can be afforded a bit of slack. I’ve worked for various publshers for over 15 years, and the number of typos, wrong answers, grammar glitches, and plain old errors of fact that I’ve seen in printed books, books that have already gone out to schools and are (presumably) being read by actual students, is staggering.
It’s not that I think it’s ok that errors exist (ok, yeah it is that I think that), but what’s really important (as I think Jimski pointed out somewhere along the way) is that whatever is essential is being communicated. If the errors are such that they get in the way of understanding, that’s legitimately a problem. But if you’re willing to suspend disbelief enough to believe a man can fly, then why can’t you forgive a misplaced comma?
You want to see bad grammar, read D&D guide books.
@ActualButt: Here’s another one.
‘Can I go to the bathroom?’-Me at age 10
‘I dont know, can you?’-English teacher
‘…..Can I please go to the bathroom?’-10 year old me
‘I dont know, can you?’-Teacher
(long, awkward stare)
‘Okay, you should say ‘may I?’ cause we all know you ‘can’ go to the bathroom’-Teacher
‘….Uh-huh…..out of the way…’-Me
Although my graamer is very paar so what the fcuk to me now?
@1SinMuse – You did it. You just won "nerdiest sentence ever" on iFanboy. No mean feat, I assure you.
There’s not nothing wrong with using double negatives now and again.
Really though, writers try to mimic spoken language, so that can be on purpose. It’s the little typos that an editor should fix that stick out to me over possibly intentional "spoken" mistakes.
Al calls out Marshall Mathers on double negatives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPwBdnknGIs
@JumpingJupiter: I include that link wherever I can, mostly to amuse myself at this point. If I could code the site to make the noise of a drum loudly beating every time someone saw it, I would.
@patio: I think there’s plenty of common ground between your view and mine. That said, I cannot tell you how much it delights me to post an article about the importance of proofreading and good usage only to find someone ardently defending the counterpoint in the comments. If anyone ever asks, "What do online discussion groups mean to you?" this is the story I will tell.
Is it a bad thing that I just now noticed you spelled downhill wrong? I always thought I had a decent grasp on the english language, but I may be mistaken.
*English.
Apparently that is a no.
I’ll be back in a while. I need to cry.
@Rustyautoparts- no, it’s not a problem that you just noticed it. If you think you know what a word is, you’ll read it fine despite it being misspelled. You figured it said "downhill" and didn’t notice the error. Besides, Ron can’t read your user name correctly, so you get a freebie.
@1SinMuse- yep, you’re right. They’re bad. I wish I had one on me right now to post an example, but the ones I’ve seen beat anything in a comic, far and away.
Also, double negatives are o.k. if used correctly (i.e. understatement). Saying "it’s not uncommon" is fine, and is also a double negative; it’s simply less direct than saying "it’s common." In poetry and oratory they call it litotes. Look that one up in your Funk & Wagnall’s!
Just to be fair, there are a number of languages in which double negatives are prefectly normal, even necessary. Just not English, heh.
I work as a copyeditor for a pretty huge publishing company (nothing exciting, trust me), and plenty of stupid mistakes make it through. Probably four or five people, minimum, go through every chapter of material, plus spellcheck, and things still ocassionaly slip by. Still, we’re working with dense technical babble, hundreds of pages of mind-numbing text. Comics should be pretty easy. I suspect it’s a case where they’re under too much pressure to make deadlines and printer dates and end up sacrificing quality.
As a writer, I know how terrible I am at catching my own mistakes. I’ll finish polishing some story up and give it to my wife and she immediately finds a dozen stupid typos. Proofreading should always done by someone else.
Oh, and can we please retire "literally"?
@BC1 You’re right that "not uncommon" is a double negative, but usually when we say "double negative" we mean "that person unitentionally said something that negated their meaning, so the statement literally means the opposite of what it should." Though, for what it’s worth, George Orwell rants against "not uncommon" for like a whole paragraph of "Politics and the English Language." And since he’s the guy who invented the phrase "double plus ungood", I give him some credit.
@ JImski – I’d be honored to become your internet anecdote
@ Rustyautoparts – It’s pretty common to overlook flopped lettres in words. That, and repeated words at the end end of lines and beginning of the next are things that the eye just jumps over. The heart sees what the mind wants it to feel.
They’re (we’re) not saying "eggs-avier", it’s "ex-avier" pronouncing the X. Besides, trying to make sense of pronunciation rules in the English language is a fruitless effort. Every rule has it’s exception; thus, that has never bothered me.
Well/good will get me every time though. I once went out with a guy who every night would call me and would end the call by saying "Sleep good." I would reply, "You too, sleep… WELL." He never caught on. We aren’t going out anymore.
I laughed, Patio.
It’s Professor "Eggzavier" as long as it’s "Magneato." It is a simple but enduring truth.
I pronounce voilà as "vi-ola". That’s correct, write?
In my latest review, All Hail Megatron #10, I wrote just how upset it made me that twice in the same page characters were found saying, "there’s too many of them!" .. it still makes me shudder.
but..
then and than being used interchangeably has been my biggest peeve lately
@itsbecca Oh, I know what you think you’re doing. But now that we talked about it, you don’t have to do it anymore.
@ohcaroline~ I totally agree with what you’re saying. I guess when I read comics, the part of my brain that searches for errors shuts off. It’s probably because I’m in my enjoyment mode that I miss these things. Unless it’s really glaring, I probably will miss it.
In my household, I am known as the comma nazi. I dislike when people over use them, or in the case of my fiance, don’t use them at all.
if its not "eggzavier" then why is his head shaped like an egg?
I find that impossible to argue with. I change my position.
I worked in a packaging plant that contained a machine referred to as the ‘orientator’. I always thought it would have been a better name for an asian potato snack.
Birthday card I spotted at the store: Girl1-"Where’s your birthday party at?" Girl2-"You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition." Inside card Girl1- "I’m sorry…where’s your birthday party at, bitch?"
Fantastic article! While I think that the internet (especially IMs) and text messaging are doing far more to mangle the English language than comics, I can certainly see your point. We have a trend in America of saying "If people can’t meet the standards, just lower the standards!" it upsets me on a daily basis. My senior year in high school, Ebonics was a hot news story and I wrote an opinion piece for the school newspaper proclaiming Ebonics to not be, in fact, a new language, but just bad English, and condemning the fact that it was actually being encouraged by teachers in the school. You would think I had defecated on the American flag in the middle of a Veterans day parade, as i was almost lynched by most of the student body. Although I did take great delight in the fact that most of my verbal responses to their moronic ranting led to vacant stares and the oh-so intelligent reply of "huh?" As Bill Hicks said, "you’re are staring at me like a dog who has just been shown a card trick." *SIGH* I miss the English language sometimes. Anyway, enough of my babbling. great article.
You hear Mitch Hederg’s bit about the letter X?
@jim
:O
"Xavier", when it is a first name is prononuced "Zay-wee-yer". When it is a last name it’s prononunced "Eggs-za-vee-yer". Unless it St. Xavier. I know weird. Just like the city in texas is "Who’s ton" and the street in NYC is "How’s ton".
But on topic, people with glass houses. *shakes head in dismay*
muddi: Nope! Zuh zuh zuh.
Xerox, xenon, xenomorph, Xerxes, Xander…. No other x-word anywhere in the language gets this treatment; I have no idea what it is about this word that makes people think it’s special; but, jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, I have had people coming out of the ceiling tiles and drainpipes to defend their God-given right to pronounce this word this insane way. This is where everyone has chosen to make their stand. This is the line in the sand. You wouldn’t believe it.
Adaption is not a word.
Never ever use it.
The phrase is "granted" not "grant it".
The only one that really bothers me is "I could care less" when you really "couldn’t care less."
I know someone who is constantly saying "supposively."
@jim:
That’s why it’s weird. No other X-starting word is treated like that but this one, and only when it’s the last name, not the first name. Nobody can explain it (and Houston,TX – Houston st., NYC thing), because there’s no explaination, except "Crazy language is crazy".
Also, anything Frank Miller has written in past 19 years should not be given to anyone.
@muddi900 To be fair, he’s right (thought I don’t agree with the other words don’t do it reasoning.) Look up one of the multiple Xavier or St. Xavier universities and colleges around the nation and they’re pronounced with a z-like x as Jim describes.
I just don’t care. X-avier sounds more awesomer.
@becca
It’s weirder still. Every sir name is X-avier except St. Francis Xavier, who’s "Zavier". You can google arround if you will. It’s a linguistic anomaly. Of course, english not being my first language, it weirds me out more.
Jimski, all your examples start with "Xe-," so we should disregard their pertinence to something starting with "Xa-." As for Xander, that is just short for Ale-X-ander.
Plus, doesn’t Stan Lee say "X-avier?" He created the character and it could be that the back story to the Xavier family is that they didn’t even know how to say their own name, just like the old Mets pitcher who pronounced his surname as "show-en weis," even though Schoenewies should be "Shane-weis."
Irregardless, the adaption of this would supposively behoove us all. Grant it, I could care less.
I lament the loss of "neither" and "nor" in common usage.
there’s neither hide nor hair of them anywhere…
I’m not too fussy about grammar and things like matching tenses and plurals in dialogue. After all, people often switch these things up when they’re speaking extemperaniously. It’s things like "should of" instead of "should’ve" or "should have" that really bug me. Because that sort of thing indiciates a fundamental misunderstanding of the language, not just a wandering thought over the course of a long sentence.
*extemporaneously
@JohnV: Do you speak Ebonics?
@Chlop – That’s obnoxious.
I know.
I hate it when people mistake "their" and "there" and "they’re" That drives me bat-shit! As one who was born in Oakland and spen the first 20 years of life there, I gringe every time someone mentions Ebonics. It was in Oakland that someone actually tried to get it in the schools as a language. I believe the definition was "Black english" or something in that vein, well having been black for 45 years I have never spoken that way and cringe when I hear people try and validate street slang as an actual langauge. I was embarrassed for years because of that nonsense
@k5blazer – Yes, the Oakland School District recognized Ebonics as a language – but for the purpose of using it to teach people how to speak proper English. It’s not like they ever intended to actually teach people to talk that way or something. And the truth is that it goes beyond slang. It has its own grammar structure and syntax, as well.
I grew up speaking this dialect -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiac
It was very frowned upon in school and kind of banned. It didn’t die but grew instead. Tell me it’s bad french. I dare you.
There’s a fun cultural difference in pronouncing names in BSG. If you notice, everyone but Baltar pronounces Hera’s name as Heh-ra. Baltar pronounces it Here-ah. Technically Heh-ra is the proper way to say it. Though I think Here-ah is the British way. As well, Professor X’s name is Ecks-avier. The Phonetic spelling for X is ecks. Technically we’re pronouncing, systematically, every X word wrong when we use a Zee sound. "Zavier" is not the logical pronunciation of Xavier, but alas. There are more examples, but say even Ras Al Ghul, many pronounce is Raish, which while technically the correct Arabic pronunciation is not the author’s intent in how the name should be said. (O’Neill has said many times it’s "Roz Awl Ghoul").
Also, I learned how to read from comics. And in a very odd sense, encountered some rather complex word choice from Morrison and Moore long before I saw them in an assigned text from school. And I could go even more in depth with how languages don’t exist except in an the moment one-on-one context, but I have to write a 15 page paper about that next week. 😉