Horrible Grammar

It's not often I see something so bad that I need to share it, but this just arrived as the header in an email from Realestate.co.nz:

Hi Kay, take a look at over 80,000 properties listed on Realestate.co.nz for sale and rent throughout NZ to find the bathroom you think screams luxury to be in to win!

:rolleyes:

Yeh that's a good one. Wouldn't buy any of those properties on principle. It's the mother of gobbledygook.

kaybe;383281 wrote: It's not often I see something so bad that I need to share it, but this just arrived as the header in an email from Realestate.co.nz:

:rolleyes:

Seems pretty typical of real estate agents' usual lack of attention to detail :rolleyes:

Ah, now we know where Towerview works in his spare time. [}]

[!][!][!]

about 5 years ago when we listed a property with an agency whose name begins with B ... I wanted to put a clause in the listing agreement that forbade the use of any apostrophes in the advertising. Because invariably, real estate agents can't ever get them right. My partner told me not to be so pedantic. I still swear the agent we dealt with thought prose was a colour and probably got less than 20% in her School C English exam.

Hmmph... as someone who did marketing as a part of my degree, followed by a number of years as a salesman, I'm rather annoyed at it from a professional point of view. First impressions count, and if the first impression is of a sub-human caveman doing the advertorial copy, disdain would steer educated and conscientious customers (who also happen to be the main employed and with discretionary income customers) away from the company...

All very well to ignore grammar when aiming ads at unemployed Txt-Spk students and career dole-ists, but not for the main run of educated and employed customer that a real estate agent would be WANTING to attract.

My current real estate fave is "highly sort after location".

It used to be 'comprising of' but that seems to be uniquely Sydney agent-speak, I don't see it here.

kaybe;383820 wrote: My current real estate fave is "highly sort after location".

It used to be 'comprising of' but that seems to be uniquely Sydney agent-speak, I don't see it here.

Yes, they may very well seek them here and seek them there, but they didn't sort the wheat from the chaff!

Comprising of is enough to make one shudder!

My pet bugbear is the word worry, which is almost always pronounced Whare (without the non correct f sound in it, instead of wurry.

Actually on the wh sound in Maori, the only person I have ever heard pronounce it correctly is Turiana. I have a Maori dictionary here written by Herbert W. Williams M.A. which was first published in 1844. My edition is 1917. In the Introduction to grammar and pronunciation, he deals quite extensively with the wh sound as being like the wh in the English word where

I still remember an advert for a magazine in America about Rachel Ray, the front page had a big photo of her and the "catchy" title was set out as:

"Rachel Ray enjoys cooking
her dogs
and her family"
no commas at all. The advert was giving the magazine hell for this blatent mistake!

and let's not even get started on the modern abuse of the apostrophe..

Chris-HB

Real Estate Agents in America ....

... I rest my case

Attached files

Stikkibeek;383824 wrote: ...
Actually on the wh sound in Maori, the only person I have ever heard pronounce it correctly is Turiana. I have a Maori dictionary here written by Herbert W. Williams M.A. which was first published in 1844. My edition is 1917. In the Introduction to grammar and pronunciation, he deals quite extensively with the wh sound as being like the wh in the English word where

Tariana Turia is from Whanganui/Wanganui so her pronunciation of /wh/ is correct for her regional dialect.

For someone from a Northern iwi the correct pronunciation would sound more like /h/.

For the vast majority of dialects it sounds more like /f/.

In each case the pronunciation is subtle, and cannot be mapped directly onto the standard English sounds. So it would be more accurate to say:

/hw/ combined with /w/ for Tariana Turia's dialect
/hw/ combined with /h/ for Shane Jones' dialect
/hw/ combined with /f/ for everyone else

My pet hate in NZ is the past tense of the verb to bring: it does actually have an R in in. It is not "bought"

This ok, "I bought a new dress and brought it home" ? ............. then I found it did not fit so I brunged it back.