My parents sent me a link to this article on prescriptivist idiocy. I’ll be honest: I couldn’t read it. I got through the first two paragraphs and suddenly all the words were drowned out by the voice in my head screaming. Just listen to this:
Some people avoid Krispy Kreme because of the calories. Angela Nickerson won’t go there because of the Ks.
“I confess, I’m a spelling, grammar and punctuation snob,” says the 35-year-old travel writer from Sacramento, Calif. “And I won’t patronize businesses with misspelled signs. It’s like hearing fingernails running down a chalkboard.”
Oh, come off it. Names aren’t English. (If they were, John Humphrys would have to change his to Humphries, and I think my first name would be properly pronounced something like gab-REE-ul, with a short initial a, stress on the second syllable, and a schwa in the last.) So too with store names. Naming something, at least to me, falls under something similar to poetic license. But this is not a point that I am interested in arguing.
Instead, I want to ask a more pragmatic question. If Nickerson really is as intransigent as she claims, where could she get a doughnut? I assume she would consider donut to be a misspelling of doughnut, so the big names in the industry would be out. Krispy Kreme, Dunkin’ Donuts (a double whammy due to the in’), Winchell’s Donuts, and Mr. Donut: all out. She could flee to Canada, but then she’d be assailed by Tim Hortons, which lacks the possessive apostrophe. Even mom-and-pop donuteries would be unacceptable; Randy’s Donuts, the famous one with the giant donut on its roof, is out, as is the best donut place in San Diego, Donut Haven. Grocery stores are mostly out as well: Ralphs lacks an apostrophe, and Safeway isn’t a word at all, so it’s inherently misspelled. I love to hold grudges, and I love to discriminate against businesses for stupid reasons, but if it came down to it, I’d be the first to swallow my pride so I could swallow a good donut.
All that said, having re-skimmed the article, I’m not entirely sure that Nickerson has been correctly characterized in the article. She may well mean that she won’t shop at places whose advertisements contain misspellings of actual words (i.e., that she wouldn’t shop at a supermarket that advertises “appels” or “cukecumbers”), but that she’s fine with stores whose names themselves are irregular. That makes a lot more sense to me, although it’s still not a platform I’d endorse. If that’s what she meant, then I apologize for furthering her mischaracterization from the article. But certainly there are people out there who hold the more extreme opinion, who won’t shop at a place that has taken artistic license with its name, and they, I think, are fools.
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February 8, 2009 at 7:34 pm
The Ridger
Oh for crying out loud. Has this woman never heard of trademarks?
February 9, 2009 at 9:40 am
Daniel
If it’s true that she refuses to patronize Krispy Kreme (and in fairness I should point out that there’s not a quote from her which specifies that chain), then it probably means she holds it against businesses if the company name is misspelled. Krispy Kreme does spell the food “doughnut”, and there’s nothing misspelled in “Hot Doughnuts Now” (a common sign at Krispy Kreme). Maybe her location has a “Drive-Thru”?
On another note, I have to say that I got a chuckle out of a couple of turns of phrase the writer used in this piece: “kick adverbs and take names” and “people who don’t know their like or as from a hole in the ground”. Were this comment in the previous thread, I’d have to say they amused me to no end.
February 11, 2009 at 4:15 pm
kaflooey
I suppose that rules out Donut King. When I was little I thought that was how it was spelt, because the Donut King spelt it that way.
April 7, 2009 at 3:22 am
Stan
So much pedantry is misplaced, and it is a waste of time to expect consistency from pedants, myself included, especially when they are hungry enough to consider compromising their pedantic principles. I am all for correct spelling, but with an implicit caveat that the spelling of a word can be correct only according to contemporary conventions.
From the introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary:
“The pronunciation is the actual living form of a word, that is, the word itself, of which the current spelling is only a symbolization – generally, indeed, only the traditionally-preserved symbolization of an earlier form, sometimes imperfect to begin with, still oftener corrupted in its passage to our time.” (original italics)
By the way, the practice of dropping apostrophes from business names and institutions has been going on since around 1900, according to Robert Burchfield.
June 4, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Michael
Happy National Donut day everybody. I shall eat a donut as I type.