Bad Gas: Bad Language

Bad Language

If I were asked to compile a list of crimes in order of seriousness, starting with the least serious, it would go something like this:

Speeding
Shoplifting
Burglary
Assault
Armed robbery
Rape
Paedophilia
Murder
Misuse of the English language

I know others out there share this view. So stand up and raise a glass to the cretins who have made this area of Bad Gas possible. It's not meant to be funny - it's a necessary service. And if you spot a howler that you're particularly fond of, photograph or scan it and tell me why you think the offender deserves to die.

The Top 20

Occasionally, the human race embarrasses itself so badly that I want to gouge my intestines out. Like a modern-day Language Jesus, I'm prepared to die for the sins of others if that's what it takes.

I always wondered what the point of council tax was.

Normally, when the English Language has had shit smeared in its face, the perpetrator is nowhere to be seen. It's a pleasure, then, to watch Paris Hilton wearing her tiny brain with pride.

When you are selling a double bed for £20 in Hackney, you can generate a lot of interest. If you are going to post an advertisement, make sure it's in code so that only those in the know can take advantage of the bargain.

If you are starring in a feature-length Disney animation and find yourself in need of a cigarette, this tobacconist may be able to help you.

I'm always suspicious of the name "Leslie". It implies gender ambiguity. It may also imply brain malfunction.

The illiterate youths who scrawled this rubbish are obviously fans of the "maths remix" of Independent Woman by Destiny's Child. Either that or they don't know the difference between an angle and an angel. I won't even bother mentioning apostrophes.

Here's a joke. Q: What did one claustrophobic toadstool say to the other? A: "Why don't you fucking learn how to spell 'mushroom'?"

People say that spelling doesn't matter. What a load of old rot. Would you buy a piece of "elctrical" equipment from this shop? Of course you wouldn't. If you did, you'd get electrocuted because the owners probably don't know the difference between watts, volts, asses and elbows.

Millionaire. Commissionaire. Frigidaire. Vegetairean?.

I think this sign must be written in braille. It's certainly not English.

I hate people who endlessly quote from Little Britain. But I'll make an exception for anybody who buys one of these t-shirts.

Last year I took the owner of a DJ equipment hire company to court. I won. But I wish I had sued him for his woeful command of the English language and his overuse of exclamation marks. I'd have won a lot more than the "poultry" amount of 475 pounds.

A decent televisual graphic requires at least four lines of text. What if you can't think of four things to say? Just insert anything you like.

I'll do anything you like; but thank God you don't want me to switch off my engine.

Fishmongery has changed a lot over the years. In the old days, shellfish stalls used to be owned by grubby Cockneys. Now, shellfish are fighting back. They are forming collectives and buying their own stalls

I'm not surprised that these people don't want any "pappers" delivered. They probably can't read.

I like advertisements that give the user a puzzle to chew over. You have to rearrange this random assortment of words to work out what the nasty money church is trying to tell you.

If you follow the BBC's calculations, at least 10 billion people must have voted in the recent Indian election. Pretty good going given that the world population is 6 billion. Twats.

There's something quite natural about a combination of linguistic stupidity and politics.

The Rest

This insult is a lot less effective if you shout it.

Even if I were to smash myself over the head repeatedly with a hammer and forcefully unteach myself every iota of the English language that I currently know, I still wouldn't plumb this depth of grammatical embuggery.

The Serbian equivalent of eBay is "diplay".

David Irving is now in jail. Thank God for that. I don't mind right-wingers but I can't bear ring-wingers.

CNN took three hours to change this headline. In that three hours, millions of people thought Bush was proposing a ban on Warner Bros. cartoons. Silly old CNN.

The rules are beginning to make sense. A plural must be "garnished" with apostrophes when the singular word ends in a non-silent vowel. And all this time I assumed that apostrophes were being used thoughtlessly by people incapable of thought.

Subtitle writer wanted. Must be able to understand South Park dialogue and speak English.

Al Qaeda appear to have adopted a catchy new chatroom name to hook in young Muslims.

Contrary to popular belief, whales do not propel themselves through water; they are steam-powered. The BBC says it so it must be true.

Depending on whether you are a pessimist or an optimist by nature, you may care to regard the glass of impossible, grammatical spasticity as half full or half empty. It's a game of "two half's".

Customised cushions are the next interior design trend in British, working-class lounges.

An electronic device (like a Blackberry) has nothing linguistic to do with a piece of fruit (like a blackberry). Always remember that if you work in technology marketing.

Clarence and his shop clearances are no strangers to this cretinous compendium.

If I tried to pick apart this gibberish, my explanatory efforts would take up a long paragraph. That's bandwidth usage I can't afford. I'm sorry.

Just one ninja? He must have been fearsome.

If you use a desktop publishing program (that includes a spell-checker) to prepare a large poster in which all of the words are in red capital letters, it can be really difficult to spot mistakes either before or after you print the poster.

To prevent people from noticing your laughably poor grasp of punctuation, it often helps to display any written material at an angle.

If somebody tells you that you're ignorant, you can try to make amends. Better still, kill yourself.

Luckily, Thuresday doesn't exist. This makes it physically impossible to stumble into the dismal-sounding Mumbai Rouge by mistake.

WARNING NOTICE: BRAIN'S SUSPENDED.

Some Dutch pancake restaurants are so authentic that they even employ monolingual Dutch people to prepare their signage.

What do kebab shop proprietors have against the letter E?

You haven't inconvenienced me; you've just profoundly offended me with your ovine language skills. How about an apology for that?

Since the onset of the War on Error, a number of insurgents have launched highly visible revenge attacks. It's a spiral of violence. Where will it end?

Some people will try to sell anything. I draw the line at sweat.

I suppose that, if you can't read and write, paper is no good to you. You may as well cook with it.

I like to think of this sign as a comprehensive menu of bad language; all my favourite dishes are on there including the "Who Gave This Fuckwit A Marker Pen?" set meal.

Some restaurants serve fresh farmyard produce. Others are run by farmyard animals.

Not many people know this, but the middle "B" in "BBC" stands for "excellent subediting".

Welcome to Kent, the Classroom of England.

If the duties of an "adminstrator" include trying to decrypt this load of gibberish, then I'm not going to bother applying for the job.

Just think of it: a chimpanzee paid a printing company hundreds of pounds to print these boxes; another chimpanzee at the printing company nodded and pressed a few buttons.

"b b" from Sheffield writes: 'I keep wanting the erroneous apostrophe from Sarni's to hover over to the missing apostrophe in Trawlers Catch. I did go in to Sarni's and ask if anyone working there was called "Sarni", just in case. I was helpfully informed that "Sarni" is short for "Sandwich"... I mean, who knew?'

If you are sensible and own a café, an off licence or a hairdressing salon, you tell people when you're open for business by hanging a sign on your door. If you are a village idiot, you get a permanent sign printed that says "Open", regardless of whether you are or not. In honour of widespread brain absence, I have put together a piece called "The Café Open Collage". Feel free to stick copies of it everywhere.

Putting a random apostrophe before the last letter of a word is so last year. If you want people to take notice, you need to put your apostrophe before the penultimate letter.

Thousands of these are sold each week. Hopefully, when people read the blurb on the back, they will unlearn how to use apostrophes.

The BBC has never thought much of the civil service.

The exquisitely placed apostrophe sets off the shabby sellotape beautifully. People should be made to pass driving tests before being allowed to use printers.

People who wanted to watch the Chelsea v Wigan match were sorely disappointed on arriving at this dunderhead's pub.

Innocuous-looking business websites are being used more and more nowadays by spymasters to communicate with their agents out in the field. This encrypted press release actually specifies the location of a chemical plant and a weapons cache.

Don't drink and make signs.

I'm not a Harry Potter fan, so I have no idea what a makesark is.

People who daub their shopfronts with multicoloured gibberish like this deserve to be force-fed a bowl of alphabet spaghetti into which I have pissed and shat.

I'm assuming that the animal footprints on this sign are a clue to the writer's genetic make-up.

Mr Good is lucky to get a dedicated parking bay for his collection of cars; they're normally very difficult to come by.

If you have a job as a car park attendant, you can't be expected to know how to read and write. Just rely on your dimwitted customers to come along and incorrectly correct you.

"Sadaam" don't surf; "wacky" t-shirt designers can't spell.

I don't like beggars; they are thieves and poofs. This wordicapped tosser seems to agree with me.

It seems that my British view of the world is at odds with the American view. I always thought that salads were insensible, inanimate mixtures of vegetables. Apparently not.

I always thought that London market stalls were the true home of the misplaced apostrophe. But I'm beginning to realise that the seaside is where they really belong.

I wonder if there's a spelling round?

I'm assuming that this shop can only afford one video camera.

Some Indian restaurants don't let you breathe. You can only use their air under certain conditions.

It's easy to master "constructon", "paintig" and "pluming"; but what about blooyd spellig?

If you're thinking of relocating to England to start a new life with your family, I must warn you about our human rights record; we have been known to imprison badly behaved toddlers.

If you spent your entire youth watching snooker instead of passing your exams, you end up as a journalist at Sporting Life.

I'm at a loss to explain this one. "9.30 = 1.30". Is this a witty philosophical conceit that illustrates how arbitrary the concept of time is? No. It's what happens when you give a black marker to an idiot.

In the Wild West, long before the days of the hair salon, they had the hair saloon. They used "plaites" back then as well.

The most popular weapon in the dullard's armoury: the misplaced apostrophe. "Toiletries" - correct. "Fancy Goods" - correct. So why the frig should "Toys" have an apostrophe?

After squeezing 18 correct plurals into his sign, the dumb-ass Roman Tackle proprietor shows his true colours with the last two. Perhaps the signwriter threw in a couple of bonus apostrophes as part of the deal. I suppose it'd be a shame not to use them.

Meanwhile, poor old George next door can't afford any apostrophes.

Would you consider getting your skin permanently marked at an Als Den owned by someone called Tattoo? I thought not. A perfect example of the "duality of the apostrophe". (Thanks to Colvin for the tip-off.)

Let's talk phone numbers. People who say "0207" deserve a painful death. People who spend money updating their shopfronts to read "0207" deserve a very painful death.

Whenever you go to France, remember to leave Alain De Botton's family alone. "Thank's".

I don't know who I feel more sorry for: all the Spurs fans who've been waiting 43 years for their team to win the league again, or these Arsenal dullards who were never allowed to go to school.

"Illiterate Shoreditch Art-Pranksters Suck".

Lazy days? So lazy that the owner couldn't be bothered to check how to use apostrophes, look up the difference between "bought" and "brought" in a dictionary or get any of the writing straight on his sign.

Never mind the punctuation and grammar, the Odeon employee who wrote this review of Troy obviously found the film a bit intellectually demanding. Hector is Paris's brother, you dullard.

If this sign made any grammatical sense, I might be tempted to pay attention to it.

I love artists for the pretentious gibberish they often spout. I love them even more when they express their gibberish using miserable spelling and grammar.

In trying to rip off "Toys R Us", these French retailers illustrate that they just haven't got a clue. Why is the "S" in quotation marks? Fuck only knows.

If you're going to start a website that teaches people about language, it helps if you can speak the frigging thing.

"Warning 111 Close Circuit Record Camaras In Operation"

A perfect example of the "Market Apostrophe".

I'm glad Tony is a "compare" at "kids partys" and not an English teacher.

No, people who work at funfairs don't know how to spell or use punctuation either.

Apparently children should be supervised by "a adult"; preferably not an illiterate one.

Here's an idea. Write a virus, compose an e-mail purporting to be from Symantec warning users about viruses, attach the virus suggesting that they should download it to ensure they are fully protected and then sit back with a clever-clever look on your face as you imagine the thousands of computers you're going to infect. The problem is, if you have a cretinous command of the English language, people who receive your e-mail will just laugh at you.

If you have a vacancy in your restaurant, it always pays to spend some time and effort putting together a job advert.

It's always a shame when you miss the opportunity to "lincdey" a guy who "whas to waisted".

If you're going to use a computer to make an advert, why not use a spellchecker too?

The problem with health food shops is that they don't sell any homeopathic remedies for illiteracy.

If you're going to open a gastropub, make sure you employ people who can spell your pretentious menus correctly.

The process of distributing medals in the Olympics is very straightforward. The BBC could at least pretend they understand it.

It's bad news when they start employing magicians as parking attendants. They don't clamp your car - they actually turn it into a clamp.

Praise the handwritten sign. Praise the "dineing suite".

If you had to read this sign three or four times before you understood it, you're not alone.

It would probably take me a whole millennium to go around the country recording how often the word "millennium" is misspelt.

Thankfully, this shop is staying right where it is; but I've got no idea whether or not it sells stationery.

You have to be careful of anyone who claims to be able to "wheelclamp" an abstract noun, especially educational institutions.

Some people are willing to learn. The owner of this van used to sell "Jacket Potato's" but now he wants to sell "Jacket Potatos". Who knows? One day he might progress all the way to "Jacket Potatoes".

If you can bring yourself to ignore the misspelling of Chiken and the use of a capital for virtually all words except those that need it (Monday and Saturday), then I'd like you to concentrate on the sheer madness involved in the "Nicy Spice" approach to abbreviating "et cetera".

Barclays, one of Britain's leading banks, may be "Fluent In Finance", according to the adverts, but they certainly aren't "Fluent In Language".

Gas is a subject close to my heart. So are languages that approximate vaguely to English.

Are all people called Lynndie fuckwits?

If you put a mong in charge of a word processor and a folder full of clip art you end up with this kind of thing.

To make international football more interesting, FIFA have decided to combine countries arbitrarily for certain fixtures. The other night, England played Poland and Holland.

The "odd's" are that the tit who made this sign doesn't have a clue how to use an apostrophe.

Children is already plural, you fuckfaces.

I'm partial to the occasional glass of red wine. I enjoy red wine even more if it comes from one of France's leading vineyards i.e. a Premier Cru, a Grand Cru or a Poplar Massive Cru. Watch out, though: the owners of this vineyard hate "honks".

Don't think for one moment that the idiocy of the English-speaking world ends there. It is infinite, eternal, all-seeing and nothing-knowing. See for yourself.