Idea? Check. Execution? Eh…

While visiting the US I stopped by Take a Bao, a new concept installed in the food court at Century City’s Westfield Mall. Despite feeling a bit funny about traveling all the way to LA for a Chinese-inspired lunch, I was drawn in by my fascination with fusion food, Take a Bao’s visual identity work, and the fact that I love char siu bao.

The idea for the place seems pretty straightforward. In their own words,

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Is “cannot” a word or a contraction?

A friend recently sent me a site listing common errors in English usage, and I’ve been looking for a relevant way of bringing it up on this site. I’ve had some fun clicking around on it.

• First, there’s the satisfaction of seeing some of my pet peeves corrected—nice to know someone shares my frustration at least. “ATM machine” and “I/me/myself” are good examples.
• Then there’s the entertainment factor—the supposedly common mistakes that I wasn’t even aware people were making. “Virii?” ”Disconcerning?”
• And lastly,

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More unnecessary quotation marks

I posted about this nerdy pet peeve of mine awhile back. Here it is rearing its ugly head again, this time accompanied by its friend, Unnecessary Capitalization.

(I haven’t won yet.) This extraneous punctuation got me thinking about people’s natural tendency to over-complicate things like names and logos, not to mention products and product features. Why is it so difficult to make things simple? And is simplicity really what we want, anyway?

Pet peeve: unnecessary quotation marks

said the store owner.

And is that an apostrophe in “restroom’s”? The unnecessary quotation marks are a pretty common error on signs, but I still find it amusing. In fact, I’ve never understood why the mistake is so common.

Turns out there’s a whole blog dedicated to them—The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.