My friend and fellow pedant Tom, 24, has submitted this glorious catalogue of errors captured in a brief trip to north-west seaside resort Morecambe. He has also provided this potted history of the town to whet, and perhaps even wet, the appetite:

“Morecambe. The mere mention of the place conjures up so many meanings. First came the glamour of the Midland Hotel, modernism writ large and a sense of British seaside optimism. The subsequent fall from grace saw the Midland left to rot, the piers washed out to sea, and the tacky arrival and decrepit departure of Frontierland. The death of 23 cockle pickers in 2004 saw Morecambe reach the bleakest point in its history. Until now.”

They even botched the first attempt at correcting that missing ‘u’. Incredible scenes.

Sensable prices:

It seems even the town’s badass graffiti-doers are plagued with incompetence. This is marvellous because of the obvious you’re/your calamity and also the sterling effort by the conscientious blue pen owner intent on subverting derogatory use of the word ‘gay’.

I think GrammarBlog should send an outreach spelling worker to sort Morecambe out.

This is the coastal town that they forgot to close down / Armageddon - come Armageddon, come.

Not my words, reader, the words of the Yorkshire Evening Post.

Please insert your own flatulence reference here, naturally.

I’m on a stag do in sunny Bournemouth but I couldn’t let this one slide.

Also note the random capitalisation throughout. This gem was seen at
the Punch and Judy pub.

Look closely at this message from Adobe advising me to download the
newest flash player.

"We have detected that your missing or need to upgrade your flash
player"

Awful.

Honestly, you put on a bouncy castle at the weekend and suddenly you think you’re playing God.

This all-round wonderfully amateurish effort is laminated, which obviously makes it all the more terrifying. Lamination renders a grammatical or lexicographical cock-up final and irreversible. And unfortunately, much like guns, laser pens and children, laminators are all too often falling into the wrong hands. I’m sure we’re all in agreement  it’s time for some kind of government policy.

Another thing I loved about this sign when I discovered it in a pub in Sale, Manchester, is the way it accidentally suggests there is a ‘pub sale’.  And it’s an inflatable pub you can bounce around on like a big loon. I’d buy it.

SOLD to the smug pedant in the far corner!

I found this on a politics blog and it tickled me. As did the thought that the action figure should be called “Gnome Chomsky”.

Ha ha ha ha ha… anyone? Ahem. Well I thought it was funny.

Better puns would be gratefully received.

I discovered this inexplicably daft instance of quotation mark abuse whilst queuing with fellow GrammarBlog stalwart Dan in a Middlesbrough bakery.

I am the son and the heir of punctuation that is criminally vulgar.

…accept for Solo and American Express.

Incest repellent

It would be very easy to make a crass joke about large sales of incest repellent in particular areas of the world where people may be bothered by over-amorous family members. I’m not going to do this for two reasons.

Firstly, geographical or class stereotyping should be abhorred as it is comparable to racism and other forms of unacceptable prejudice. Secondly, the people of Norfolk get very uppity when jokes are made about the size of their gene-pool and have been known, on occasion, to send angry protest emails. That is of course once they have stopped trying to feed stamped and addressed envelopes into their disk-drives and figure out how to open outlook.

Gene-pond! I should have called it that. That would have been a good one.

Must go, I hear my new email alert going off…

Student Acccomodation at Northumbria Uni

Is this snap of a student letting ad near Northumbria University a pithy answer to the old Poly vs Uni debate? I’ll let you decide.

A note from Gez:

Thanks to Gavin who brought this to our attention via Twitter. If you don’t yet follow us on twitter, come and join in the fadtastic fun. You’ll get updates when we publish blog posts and whenever a new image is added to our flickr pool. Tom and I will also post links to bits and bobs we find interesting, annoying or funny.

We’ve recently passed the milestone of having 1000 followers. Consequently, this post is dedicated to our 1000th follower,  twitter user @fredericafrisco. She’s new to twitter so why don’t you all go and say hello?