Month: May 2009

“Signitures”

Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this last week on an order form.

Problem:
This word is misspelled.

Explanation:
The order form had an area at the bottom where the customer was supposed to sign his or her name.

The order-form creator misspelled “Signatures” as “Signitures” — with an “i” in the middle — perhaps because of confusion from words such as “signify” — spelled S-I-G-N-I-F-Y — or perhaps because of mispronunciation of the letter “a” in the word “signatures”.

“Signify” dates back to the early 1200s and comes from the Latin word “significare”, which means to make a sign.

In contrast, “signature” dates back to around 1530 and comes from the Latin word “signare”, which means to mark.

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

  • “signature” — with the letter “a” in the middle — 185,000,000 matches
  • “signatures” — with the letter “a” in the middle — 34,700,000 matches
  • “signiture” — with the letter “i” in the middle — 384,000 matches
  • “signitures” — with the letter “i” in the middle — 57,700 matches

Combining the singular and plural results, this tells me that Web authors have used the correct letter “a” over the incorrect letter “i” by a ratio of 497-to-1, which is excellent. However, over 400 thousand misspellings is a bit troubling.

Solution:
“Signatures”

“12 mbps”

Abbreviations

I saw this yesterday in a document about the maximum download speed made available by an Internet service provider.

Problem:
The provider misstated the download speed by one billion times!

Explanation:
The Internet service provider (ISP) was bragging about the maximum download speed that any of its customers could obtain.

The ISP was trying to say that the maximum speed was twelve megabits per second.

The ISP correctly wrote the final three letters correctly because lowercase-B-P-S stands for “bits per second”.

The problem is with the initial, lowercase “m”.

Lowercase “m” stands for milli, the prefix that means 1/1000 and is found in words such as “millimeter”.

The ISP should have used uppercase “M”, which stands for mega, the prefix that means one million and is found in words such as “megapixel”.

So “1 mbps” (with a lowercase “m”) is one billionth as fast as “1 Mbps” (with an uppercase “M”).

Solution:
“12 Mbps”

“I have two train of thoughts on that.”

Common English Blunders, Plurals

I heard this last week on a conference call.

Problem:
The speaker pluralized the wrong word.

Explanation:
Someone made a comment during a conference call.

The call’s facilitator responded to the comment by saying, “I have two train of thoughts on that.”

Given that “two” modifies “train” and not “thought”, the word “train” — not the word “thought” — should have been pluralized.

This type of mistake is a common English blunder in spoken American English because avoiding it requires one to think quickly beyond the common pattern of putting the pluralizing S or E-S at the very end of a concept, which in this case is “train of thought”.

Another example of this type of mistake is pluralizing “attorney general” by saying the incorrect phrase “attorney generals” instead of the correct phrase “attorneys general”.

Solution:
“I have two trains of thought on that.”