I don't usually get too annoyed with flagarant disregard for grammar. The movie "Two Week's Notice", (which should be "Two Weeks' Notice,") is a shameless part of my dvd collection.
But I have encountered an example of grammar abuse that I just cannot let go. I'm sitting on the couch, watching TV and unwinding after a long day at work. A commercial comes on for a chain restaurant, The Outback Steakhouse. The voice-over is done in Austrailian, because Aussie=fun, apparently. Same as how as an English accent=educated. I'm sure there are just as many high school dropouts in England as there are in America. But I digress.
The commercial is rambling along, and then the tag-line, the focus of this new ad campaign: "Live Adventurous!" Live Adventurous? Live ADVENTUROUS?! Even my Microsoft Word program put a green squiggle underneath this. It's Live Adventurously. You can't Noun a Verb. Or whatever. You Adverb a Verb.
Whatever the correct explanation of this grammar abomination, the ad makers should have read enough writing in their life to know when something is "wrong." I never knew those spelling rules, "i before e" or whatever. But I had read enough, and encountered enough, to know that some things "look" right, and some don't.
I was picking up the house keys from a lady who was going on vacation. I was going to babysit her dog while she was away. "Does your dog walk good on a leash?" I asked her.
"Yes," she said, "my dog walks well on a leash."
I was mortified. As well I should have been. Bad grammer makes a person look below-the-baseline of average intelligence. Worse, it makes a person look like they don't care how others view them. I would never go to "Outback Steakhouse" now - if they can't create an ad that doesn't grate on one's grammar sensibilities, they probably can't make correct change of my bill, either.
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