Good Grief!

It’s not good when your mother calls the soulless office park to complain about a grammatical error on your weblog. The phrase in contention concerns Wilbur, my favorite pig and the protagonist of Charlotte’s Web. I wrote that Wilbur tried to spin a web by jumping off of his manure pile.
According to Mrs. Moon Pappy, […]

The City Paper’s most recent cover story discusses Philadelphia’s ailing public transportation system and ways to revamp it*. I was innocently reading along, agreeing with some of the ideas, until I saw this monstrosity:
SEPTA [Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority] could incentivize riders in creative ways…
Ouch. I thought we’d seen the last of incentivize when […]

We’ve all been assigned work tasks unrelated to our actual job descriptions. For example, last year I got the following instruction:
Tell Annoying E to stop sending those fucking e-mails. But say it nicer than that.
I’m happy to oblige because I’m a professional company woman. In addition, I excel at sending polite messages that tell the […]

He likes us to keep abreast of the Business Intelligence field by reading websites, trade rags, and whatever else we can get our hands on. Last year I got him to buy copies of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball for the entire team because, hey, we can all learn from Billy Beane’s innovative use of data. Unfortunately, […]

He is busy making a PowerPoint presentation for Important People. We had words.
Boss-across-the-hall: Please review these slides.
Me: [5 minutes later] Technically, what comprises the e-mail system is incorrect. The whole comprises its parts. The parts compose the whole.
BOTH: Really? Well, I like the way comprises sounds. I’ll […]

Everyone’s been dissin’ Alabama lately. Once again (for, like, the third time in a week), I will break the Good Grief! no politics rule and use microjournalism expertise to expose the rest of the story.
Bernard Kincaid, the mayor of Birmingham, has decreed that all City Hall e-mail correspondence shall henceforth be written in […]

Having a weblog sure is a good way to develop thick skin. Since starting Good Grief!, I’ve been accused of being a poisonous cynic, called a bitch, insulted by the ice cream man, and cyber-stalked by short-shorts guy.
But now, someone named Mike is calling me a prescriptive grammarian. Oh, the horror!
In linguistics prescription […]

Last night at tutor training, we learned an acronym to describe the process for writing essays. Writing is POWER: Plan, Organize, Write first draft, Edit, Rewrite.
This acronym is pretty good, but it doesn’t apply to the new world order of weblogs. Planning and organizing? That’s for SUCKAHS!

Select sophomoric topic
Use good title*
Cut […]

Why would Good Grief! sing the praises of the Old 97’s, a band with such an unorthodox use of the apostrophe? Some might call this apostrophe pesky. After many sleepless nights, I found the answer on the band’s website:
Why is it “Old 97’s” and not “Old 97s”? Are the Old 97’s confused about […]

What a great month! A leave of absence from the soulless office park, a trip to Canada, and now a Powerpuff Girls font.

TV and movie fonts. Link via BBSpot.

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