A business opportunity

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Today's F-minus:

[Hat tip: Josh Rosenberg]

For linguistic as well as comedic background, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here. and here.



8 Comments

  1. Michael W. said,

    March 9, 2009 @ 12:02 am

    This is the first ever F-minus that I really liked. I still need a card for "I apologize if anyone was offended." But I guess it'd be tough to know who to send it to.

    The Sunday Zits was another language-related one. A teen comes to visit another and communicates the whole time via SMS. It also seems to me to have entirely realistic 'textspeak' involving predictive word completion (hence 'kitchen' and 'cookies' but 'sposed'). Then again, 'bath-room' isn't quite right.

  2. Cecily said,

    March 9, 2009 @ 6:39 am

    @Michael, a good non-apology when you say a double entendre is to "apologise to anyone who was offended by their own thoughts".

  3. Michael said,

    March 9, 2009 @ 7:59 am

    Most apologies are false; otherwise we wouldn't need the expression: "My sincere apologies"…

  4. Cecily said,

    March 9, 2009 @ 9:17 am

    I'm not sure if that's a joke, a serious semantic point, or both.

    Whilst there are certainly plenty of false apologies around, I don’t use the presence or absence of the word “sincere” to differentiate. In fact often, when I hear “sincere apologies”, the phrase “the lady doth protest too much, methinks” usually comes to mind.

  5. Monday morning roundup | And Still I Persist said,

    March 9, 2009 @ 10:37 am

    […] snub of British PM Gordon Brown (and his family!) was a fluke, think again. Maybe Obama could use one of these greeting cards. In the meantime, he could certainly use better political advice than he's been getting. And […]

  6. I’m sorry… « Mr Prestney’s English Blog said,

    March 9, 2009 @ 4:13 pm

    […] from F-Minus via Language Log […]

  7. pduggie said,

    March 10, 2009 @ 12:20 pm

    Strangely, "My bad" is a very clear and direct self-apology.

  8. Sissyphus said,

    March 16, 2009 @ 4:33 pm

    Also on the topic, an amusing, if crass, article on Cracked last week:

    http://www.cracked.com/article_17105_6-most-insincere-apologies-all-time.html

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