{"id":10920,"date":"2008-01-31T11:03:47","date_gmt":"2008-01-31T16:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/01\/31\/10920.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:09","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:09","slug":"the-little-oshaped-pasta-in-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/01\/31\/the-little-oshaped-pasta-in-a\/","title":{"rendered":"The little O-shaped pasta in a tasty tomato sauce that kids love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Gentle Readers will be aware that Your Humble Blogger is a former stickler. That does not, however, prevent me from noticing actual errors when I see them, particularly when printed and distributed in a manner that really ought to require not just proof-reading but actual copy editing.<br \/>\n<p>Take, for example, the microwave instructions printed on a can of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.campbellsoup.com\/spaghettios.asp\">SpaghettiOs<\/a>. I reproduce it here in its entirety:<br \/>\n<p><strong>Microwave:<\/strong> <em>Microwave ovens vary. Time given is approximate.<\/em> Heat, covered in medium microwaveable bowl on <strong>HIGH 1&frac12; to 2 minutes<\/strong>. Careful, leave in microwave 1 minute, then stir.<br \/>\n<p>It seems to Your Humble Blogger that the use of <I>careful<\/I> is a grammatical error. But I&#8217;m not exactly sure what kind of error. It seems to me that it is standing in for <I>Be careful<\/I>, which is the sort of thing that English allows sometimes, although in that case it shouldn&#8217;t be conjoined with a comma to the rest of the sentence. The error is clearly not simply substituting the adjective form for the adverb; they don&#8217;t mean that we should <I>carefully leave [the bowl] in the microwave<\/I>.<br \/>\n<p>See, the thing about errors of grammar is that it should be possible to re-write the sentence in such a way that that the grammar is correct and the sense is correct, too. And I know what the sense is, but I can&#8217;t seem to make a better sentence. <I>Leave in microwave 1 minute, then carefully remove cover and stir<\/I> seems to be all right, but wordy (and the space is limited). There&#8217;s probably room for <I>Being careful, leave in microwave&#8230;<\/I> which (a) still sounds wrong, although it seems to diagram properly, and (2) implies that you could grammatically take out the <I>being<\/I>, which gets us back where we started.<br \/>\n<p>How would you, Gentle Reader, correct the SpaghettiOs can? Because Your Humble Blogger&#8217;s ability to enjoy SpaghettiOs is already limited enough (although it is at least something I can contemplate swallowing with equanimity, and represents a change from chicken soup&#8212;a change for the worse, certainly, but imagine how good the chicken soup will taste next meal) without being irritated by issues of grammar and wording.<br \/>\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger is not really fit for human company, and should go back to bed. Again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hatchet-job"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18245,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920\/revisions\/18245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}