There are many sites on the internet that collect and chronicle mistakes in English grammar/punctuation/usage, but I’ve decided to highlight this one this week, mostly because I only stumbled upon it recently.

Some of the errors are subtle, and MIGHT be attributable to someone just not catching an error, but some of them, like the one above, are just putrid in the abuse of the language.

I hope you all enjoy! (or try not to cry)

This week’s site: The Pedant’s Revolt

A few of the people from the new MTV show that everyone loves or vehemently hates, Jersey Shore, were on Jay Leno’s show last night. Pauly D, Snooki, and Mike “The Situation” made an appearance on a fake game show called Battle of the Celebrity All-Stars.

Now, from the Jersey Shore show, you don’t get the idea that between the three of them you have a single functioning brain (or moral compass), but from watching last night, I sincerely hope there was a wholeeeeee lot of acting going on. First, bask in the glory that is the three of them:

Mike "The Situation" from MTV's Jersey Shore

Nicole "Snooki" from MTV's Jersey Shore

Pauly D from MTV's Jersey Shore

The degree to which the lack of intelligence was displayed last night was hilarious, if not tragic. I’m pretty sure it was fake, because if not, well, oy.

You can find a few clips from last night here.

Please watch it. It’s great stuff.

That’s right, ladies and gents, on this day in 1773, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor in protest of the Tea Tax. For more information about the Boston Tea Party, click here.

For those who are on Twitter, the information you can learn is overwhelming. There are hundreds of celebrities, athletes, news agencies, sportswriters, et cetera, bombarding you with information. Besides being the first to know with whom Tiger slept, or which baseball player signed with which team, you can find someone doing something pretty cool on Twitter. Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large for Merriam-Webster, has an account. On it, he “offers up daily dispatches on new words, etymology and more. Read his tweets about the latest happenings at Merriam-Webster and the wider world of lexicography and linguistics.”

I have enjoyed following him tremendously. One of my favorite things he posts is the words that people are searching for most frequently on Merriam-Webster’s website. For example, he posted this today:

Huge lookups for ‘indefinite’ since Friday. http://tinyurl.com/y9y2z8b All Tiger, all the time.

Tiger Woods says he’s taking an indefinite leave from golf to get his life and marriage back together. As a result, people flock to m-w.com to look up the word they aren’t sure about.

Another example:

‘Infamy’ most looked-up word yesterday http://tinyurl.com/yd3bnpm Pearl Harbor Day.

On December 7, 1941 the terrible attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. The following day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a famous speech which included one of the more famous lines spoken by a U.S. president – “a date which will life in infamy”. Lo and behold, in 2009, on Pearl Harbor Day, many flock to the dictionary to look up the word infamy.

It’s really cool to me that you can see what’s going on in the world, or popular culture, or just what’s on people’s minds by the words they search for.

For those that are interested, you can “follow” Peter Sokolowski by clicking here. I would very much recommend it.

New York Giants RB Brandon Jacobs

New York Giants WR Domenik Hixon

Very nice game by the Giants yesterday. Everyone considered it a must-win. It was to be a “statement game”, if the Giants wanted any real chance at making the playoffs, and that’s exactly what it was. The game wasn’t a blowout by any means, but the Giants played pretty well on all three sides of the ball, highlighted by the two longest plays for the Giants all year. As seen in the pictures above, the first RB Brandon Jacobs taking a screen pass in the third quarter from Eli Manning 74 yards for a touchdown. I loved seeing that truck of a man barreling down the field all the way in for the score. The other huge play was Domenik Hixon’s 79-yard punt return for a touchdown in the fourth quarter, the score that was the nail-in-the-coffin, providing the Giants with a vital win.

The win puts the Giants just one game back from the Cowboys and Eagles (Giants 7-5 v. Cowboys/Eagles 8-4). It’s a whole new division now. Six more catches for Steve Smith, giving him second place in WR catches this year. It was great to see Mathius Kiwanuka knock the ball loose and see Osi Umenyiora scoop it up, especially after Osi had all the bad press this past week.

Seeing those guys celebrate just warms the cockles of my heart.

Next up – Philadelphia Eagles

You may click here for a highlights video of the game from Giants.com.

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.

Every Sunday the page is updated with new postcards sent in with anonymous people’s secrets. I love how frank people are and how free they feel to be honest when they don’t have to be accountable for the truth or have someone judge them for it. A really interesting insight into people’s true thoughts and feelings when they can finally free them.

A bonus for visiting recently is that there’s a new video at the top of the page with people confessing for the camera.

Disclaimer: If you’re offended by pictures or words of a sexual nature, or don’t like reading about some people’s fantasies, or otherwise usually unshared thoughts, you may want to pass on this site.

Today’s site: PostSecret

New York Giants G Chris Snee

1. “They’re looking to deliver the knockout punch,” said Giants guard Chris Snee. “We’ll see who delivers the knockout on Sunday.”

New York Giants LB Michael Boley

2. “This division is wide open,” said linebacker Michael Boley. “At this point in the year with this many games left it’s up in the air. It’s a crap-shoot. I’m not going to say they’re the team to beat. Anybody has a chance to win this division. It’s all about how you finish.”

New York Giants DE Justin Tuck

3. Justin Tuck said earlier this week that, on a scale of one to 10, his confidence is an “11″. His teammates seem to feel the same way.

New York Giants TE Kevin Boss

4. “It’s hard not to lose a little confidence when you’re on a losing streak like this,” said tight end Kevin Boss. “But I think we’ve kind of got to refuse to feel that lack of confidence and just remember how we started the season. There’s no reason why we can’t win these next several games and give ourselves a legitimate shot at making a run in the playoffs.”
5. “We haven’t been winning lately so people are going to write us off and that’s all right with us,” Boss said. “We still believe in each other.”

New York Giants Head Coach Tom Coughlin

Coach Tom Coughlin has a quote that seems more reasonable. “Naturally they are down. Everywhere they look they’re being beaten down. We’re trying the best we can to get the spirits back up.”

The team has either played very poorly recently, or has played almost well enough to win, only to lose at the last minute. The one victory they did get they almost blew and needed an overtime field goal to avoid further embarrassment. Granted, they have been hurt, to some degree. Kenny Phillips was supposed to be a star at Safety, but they lost him for the season early on. Now, you have “Defensive Captain and General” Antonio Pierce for the season, as well. Apparently the coaches didn’t love the way Chase Blackburn played as his replacement at Middle Linebacker, because this week second-year MLB Jonathan Goff will be starting instead. We’ll see how this plays out; the coaches seem to be high on him.

Besides the season-ending injuries, and their consequences, the Giants have also been dealing with random injuries that are making life much tougher. RB Ahmad Bradshaw has been playing with two injured feet, RB Danny Ware has been ruled out of this week’s game because of a concussion, and S Michael Johnson didn’t practice today either.

If the Giants want to have any chance at making the playoffs, this week is a must-win. They’re playing a motivated, hot Dallas Cowboys team, which is currently two games ahead of the G-Men. The Giants would really need this win anyway, because they’re a game out of the Wild Card also, and don’t want to fall too far behind from playoff contention. The Giants need to turn it around, and who better to defeat soundly than their NFC East division rival, the team they just barely beat in the new stadium in Dallas earlier this season.

Everyone’s favorite abuse victim, Rihanna, has decided to speak her mind about a topic near and dear to her heart. Rihanna, whatever that name means, advises every woman to take nude pictures of themselves, because “In five years my body might not look like this!” There you have it, ladies and gents. Despite the growing problem of young teens taking photos of themselves and sending them to people, this genius is advocating that EVERYONE should be doing this. You can read the entire article for all of the quotes from this expert on morals here.

Now, I don’t think (hope, anyway) that too many people look to pop stars as role models anymore, but for someone who got the bejeezus pounded out of her a few months ago, you’d think she’d cool it on the crazy for a little while. The aftermath can be seen below.

Rihanna after Chris Brown beat her

Far be it from me to tell people not to take photos of themselves, but is this really the message that she should be spreading? MENSA just crossed her off the list of potential members.

Susan Boyle Album Cover

The juxtaposition was remarkable. We’re used to our musicians and actors being these young, stunning, darlings with out-of-this-world beauty and panache. And yet, this is as far from the case as we could have imagined. Susan Boyle’s singing was remarkable, while the looks, well, were also remarkable, but not in such a good way. The spectacular incongruity of it all made us all watch her, rapt attention paid to the voice referred to by some as angelic, leaving us with perhaps even an ambivalence about her looks, wanting the two to “match”.
Millions followed her rapid ascention to worldwide fame, almost overnight, watching one who might have been a hermetic recluse adjust to the constant, frenetic pace of the media and those who circle above, waiting impatiently to swoop down with their cameras, unafraid to badger and bewilder their prey until the inevitable breakdown.

After a long while, the day has come when Ms. Boyle has released an album of her own, allowing her international brood to no longer be limited to internet videos and random snippets from here and there.

I was looking forward to finding out whether her celebrity was merely due to her less than pretty looks, or whether her well-known set of pipes could hold their own and allow her to be a singer instead of the media freak she’s been until now.

My advise – stick to the videos. The voice we all absorbed in shocked amazement as we heard Les Miserables brought to life in the least likely of actors is still pretty good, but when the surprise and curiosity of her fame is gone, much of the luster and elation disappears, leaving you wanting more of the rare voice, less the empty celebrity. Don’t get me wrong; her voice is very nice, and the songs are all generally well-known, but the expectations for someone who wowed the entire world leave one very disappointed.

On this day 146 years ago, one of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, delivered one of the most recognizable speeches of all time, the Gettysburg Address.

The text:

The only known picture of President Lincoln at Gettysburg: