Month: September 2008

“That’s imported travertine marble from Italy.”

Common English Blunders, Nouns

I heard this the other day on the HGTV “House Hunters International” television program.

Problem:
Travertine is not marble.

Explanation:
The statement was made by a real-estate agent showing a house to a prospective buyer.

The problem with the statement is that it contains the phrase “travertine marble”, which is a common English blunder.

Travertine is a sedimentary rock.

In contrast, marble is a metamorphic rock that is created by the metamorphism of limestone.

Therefore, travertine is not a type of marble and should not be used to modify the noun “marble”.

Solution:
“That’s imported travertine from Italy.”

How much to correct this misspelling?

Misspellings

I wrote a blog post a few days ago about how eleven misspellings cost the city of Livermore, California, six thousand dollars plus the round-trip airfare for a Miami artist to fix her work.

Here is another example of a costly misspelling.

The owners of a home in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, England, had “MILLENIUM HOUSE” — with only one “N” in the middle of the first word — carved by a stone mason into a huge piece of stone that sits above the entrance to their home.

Apparently, the Knaresborough construction company that built the house was named “Millenium Designs” — again with only one “n” in the middle of the first word — and the home owners unfortunately assumed that the home builder had spelled “Millennium” correctly.

So the home owners copied a misspelling, and they did it so royally that the misspelling is carved into stone.

What is worse is that the stone is not easily replaced, given that it supports the stone wall above the entrance.

I wonder how much this misspelling would cost to correct. I assume it would be higher than the US$600 per misspelling paid by Livermore, California, for the misspellings in its mosaic.

What is the most expensive misspelling about which you have ever read? If you have one that you want me to share with other readers, please contact me. Be sure to include a link to the Web page where the misspelling is described.

“Professional Trainings”

Common English Blunders, Nouns, Plurals

I saw this on the cover of a brochure that my wife got recently.

Problem:
“Trainings” is not a word.

Explanation:
“Professional Trainings: 2008-2009” was the full title of the brochure from a “Training Institute for Improved Health”.

The brochure described various educational sessions to be presented by the Institute.

The word “training” as a noun means the instruction or education of a person who is being trained.

Given that the nouns “instruction” and “education” have no plural form, the noun “training” has no plural form, and therefore “trainings” is not a word.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to prevent variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “training” — 725,000,000 matches
  • “trainings” — 13,700,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 52.9:1, which is good, but the fact that the Web contains nearly fourteen million instances of “trainings” is outrageous!

It is also clear that erroneous pluralization of the noun “training” is definitely a common English blunder.

For fun, I also searched Google for each of the following phrases (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “professional training” — 5,190,000 matches
  • “professional trainings” — 47,700 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the phrase correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 109:1, which is much better, especially when one notices that “trainings” returned about fourteen million matches but that “professional trainings” returned fewer than fifty thousand matches.

I suppose that this says that most professionals know that “trainings” is not a word!

Solution:
“Professional Training”