Dialect coaches for Silicon Sally

I have long been annoyed by the automated announcements of departing flights in many Canadian airports. The English announcements are made by an American English voice and the French ones by a Continental French voice. It makes one feel like a stranger in one's own country to hear our capital city referred to as "Attawah". On complaining to Air Canada I was told there was no Canadian program available, which I find hard to believe.
I was equally surprised on a recent trip to Minneapolis to discover that the automated voice in the tram between the transit station and the terminal adjured us to stay "cleah of the doohs" in a decidedly British accent.
These computer-generated announcers need a dialect coach!

Something to chew on

Just back from Rome, where some delightful menu translations gave me pause. Not sure whether I was more taken aback by "Dread topped with tomatoes" or "Fried cud"!

No doubt about it

A very common error is to write or say "undoubtably". The word is "undoubtedly". If you really want to impress people, you could also use "indubitably".

Oh for heaven's sake

I am getting more than a little annoyed by bend-over-backward attempts to avoid words that mean "Christmas". First it was the "Holiday Tree", and now I just saw in the grocery store a cake traditionally called a "Yule Log" rebaptized a "Festive Log". Considering that Yule was a pre-Christian festival (and the real yule logs part of that), who do we think we are offending by using the word?

Talk about giving your all for your art

Saw this on a plaque at Canada's National Ballet School tonight:
"Batik is an art form that involves outlining a picture with wax, dying, and then drying".
What they meant, of course, was "dyeing".

conditional sentences

I have few pet peeves, but one of them is incorrect verb tense sequence in conditional sentences, like this one I just read in the paper:
"If we didn't do this study, we would have missed a lot of women with a genetic mutation."
This should have been:
"If we hadn't done this study, we would have missed a lot of women with a genetic mutation."
People get even more confused when they're using the verb "may". People don't seem to realize that "might" is the conditional of "may", so they say things like, "If we hadn't done this study, we may have missed a lot of women with a genetic mutation," which should be "If we hadn't done this study, we might have missed a lot of women with a genetic mutation,"

Snowmageddon

Here's a newish word that seems to be catching on. A quick Google search unearthed the earliest usage I could find, from January 2005 in Richmond, Virginia. For the next three years, usage increased gradually, reaching about 700 hits in 2008, but in 2009 it exploded to 12,500 hits.