Saturday, May 3, 2008

Crimes Against English: Email

Crimes Against English is a semi-occasional feature of Hopelessly Eclectic. I use these posts to shame alleged native English–speakers into stopping the senseless abuse of a language that's just minding its own business, after all. For more information about C.A.E. philosophy, see http://hopelesslyeclectic.blogspot.com/2007/01/crimes-against-english.html.

We at CAE are thrilled to bring you the latest innovation in defeating language criminals: the email exposé. Today, we bring you this real example, unearthed by the CAE operative code-named Y-Contributor. The following email was sent from a maintenance technician to the plant manager of a large facility in a major manufacturing company. Names have been changed to protect the clueless.




To: (Supervisor), (Plant Manager)
From: (Technician X)
Date: xxxxxx
cc: Bert
Subject: power outage

Me and Bert for a air conditioner to be bad. One of
the condenser cooling fans has a bad bearing we think.
There is 2 of the unit that are not running. The
latest on in the only one that is turned off on the
north side of the building. The other one in on the
south side. There also may be a problem with on on
the paint booth as well. Ever thing was running good
when we went home.

Best Regards
(Technician X)
Maintenance
City, state
Phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx
Fax: xxx-xxx-xxxx


After rereading, we realized that we need to emphasize that this is real. The only changes we made were to remove identifiable information. To paraphrase Dave Barry, we are not making this up.

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