It really bothers me when professional people misspell words in professional documents. I was in one of the first groups to take a class this newly required 1 day course on Lean. It was a class on efficiency and assembly lines and generally how to use common sense. I felt like the class should be geared toward lower-level management or quality assurance people, but there were 2 engineers from my office and 20 or so blue collar workers, mostly laboring on aircraft maintenance.
Anyway, at some point the instructor started an exercise in which we pretended to be people in a production environment trying to improve efficiency on an assembly line, so the word queue came up a lot. Now, the instructor said the word several times and used it in proper context ("The man at station 4 had a long queue so it might be a good idea to balance the work more evenly so he doesn't have a queue so long that drags down the overall efficiency.") The problem was that he had sheets of paper with "QUE" written on it for where each person was supposed to place their items when passing to the next one in line. I was the last one in the line, the quality control person, and I was defiant and turned the piece of paper over. Que is not a word, at least not in English, and it is painful for me to look at it. The assistant instructor comes over and turns the paper right-side up and I immediately flip it back over, while pointing out that the word is misspelled everywhere. No one acknowledges my comments and everyone goes on with the exercise.
Was I the only one to notice this gross misspelling or was I just the only one who knew or was I just the only one that cared? I have seen people make this error other times lately (leaving off the second ue on queue) but I had always thought this was a fairly common word. Some of the engineers I play scrabble with have recently tried to use "que" in our Wednesday scrabble games and I cringe every time I see it. I know engineers aren't supposed to be great at spelling (and neither are assembly line workers) but the guy teaching should definitely know better. Presumably, he at least typed this into MS Word and should have noticed the squiggly red line underneath the word indicating that it is wrong.
Que is Spanish for what.
Queue is an English word for a FIFO (first in, first out) line of people or things waiting their turn.
Get it right.
I get pitches from publicists all the time asking me to blog about their clients' products and promos. When you pitch an idea to an editor, proofread your work or you're going in the spam folder.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how many professional writers still can't form a sentence.
I am amazed by the lack lf writing skills in the general public but for people who call thenselves writers, its must be really abnoying. For the record, this is not a professional blog. I don't spend more than 15 minutes on any post and generally dont proofreader (except on bridgeblogging, which is more professional)
ReplyDelete