Spotted from a sidewalk café on Smith St, Brooklyn.

Dear Budweiser Truck Artist,

You only had four words to get right, one of which was eight feet wide. The task didn’t exactly call for micro-level proofreading. How much merchandise did you sample before you painted this?

Yours, agog,

Michele

…

Call me a prig, a pedant, the grammar police. To my prescriptivist mind, these are compliments, if not blatant come-ons.

Yes, I collect crimes against language, and when I’ve assembled enough material, I explode into a rant. (I’m evidently not alone in this preoccupation.)

A tasty dish is a tasty dish, no matter how it’s spelled or phrased. But as far as first impressions go, a spelling or grammar error on an otherwise promising menu is like VPL on a YSL gown. Restaurateurs, you can do better.

I’m not interested in pillorying individual establishments for isolated typos. I’m concerned with industry-wide trends, the most irksome of which I am highlighting here. As always, I welcome additions to the list.

1. Favrisms. These are named in honor of everyone’s favorite quarterback, Brett Favre. As a latecomer to the wacky world of American football, I thought my boyfriend was joking when he explained that the surname really is pronounced /ˈfɑrv/. The same consonant-shifting forces are at work in a certain soft cheese and a ubiquitous smoked pepper, which restaurant professionals seem constitutionally incapable of referring to by anything other than marscapone (to rhyme with “Al Capone”, no less) and chipolte. (My eyes! My ears! My faith in the authenticity of your establishment!)

Vowels aren’t immune to Favrism, either. The “i” and “u” in prosciutto are routinely inverted on panini lists and wine bar chalkboards across the city, New York’s rich Italian history be damned. The misspelling isn’t just unsightly, it actually alters the pronunciation. A pro-SQUEE-to sandwich doesn’t sound appetizing, it sounds malaria-ridden.

2. Preposition doubling. Au jus already means “with jus“. “With au jus” had better indicate a whole lot of jus.

3. Speaking of jus, I have a problem with Francophilia that flies in the face of cognates. Unless you’re using jus to refer to the liquid output of roast meat or some other ingredient not commonly made into a beverage, what is so terribly deficient about the word “juice”? And by “apple gêlée”, I assume you mean “apple jelly”? Just checking.

4. Finally, mescaline is a hallucinogen, not a salad blend.

Seriously? On the waterfront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

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