Friday, October 26, 2007

Pet Peeve of the Day: Companies That Can't Spell

If I had to name the one thing that makes me crazy on a daily basis, I’d choose dealing with a company that can’t spell its own name. I have to pay Xcel Energy for gas every month but at least I dumped phone service from Qwest. Everywhere I look, I find companies that have misspelled words in an attempt to be cute or creative.

Why would I buy decking material from a company that can’t spell “deck” correctly? Why couldn’t Flickr include that “e” and where did Digg get that extra “g”? Demonstrating your inability to spell a word correctly (or refusal to do so) does not inspire confidence in your competence to deliver a service.

Unfortunately, you can trace a long tradition of “kreativ” spelling to pre-web days. Sensis brags that they’ve been around for over a century. I still wouldn’t trust them to provide accurate information, since they can’t even spell census.

I hereby offer my advice to people searching for a company name: spell it right or make up a word entirely. If you’d rather have something that no one can spell correctly, use your name. Don’t irritate potential customers by purposely misspelling a word that they could otherwise use to find you. You’ll lose customers to companies who trust their spell check more than their trend-o-meter.

Apparently, belonging to the NaBloPoMo group of Cranky Bloggers has rubbed off on me. I don’t count things like NaBloPoMo as misspellings as they are somewhere between abbreviations and acronyms. I will research whether a word for such constructions exists and let you know. I’ve not heard of one but there probably is a proper term.


2 comments:








Anonymous

said...

Hello fellow Cranky Blogger! I get crazy over misspellings, too. I'm a medical transcriptionist and what makes me craziest is the antiarrhythmic drug, "Rythmol." No, that's not a typo...an antiarRHYthmic drug spelled "RYthmol." Gah! I spell it wrong every single time and always get flagged for it.





Unknown

said...

That would make me crazy, as well. I considered writing about pharmaceutical companies, as well, but decided that it would require a 2,000-word post just to cover their "creativity".