English? You must be joking!

The other day, I was in a bookshop and I noticed, as I approached the checkout, an arrow on the floor saying, "Queue here for payment". So, when I got to the front of the queue, I asked the cashier for my payment. This generated some confusion, but, to her credit, the cashier quickly understood the grammatical error when I pointed at the arrow and, I think, appreciated the humour. If you have not recognised the error, this site is for you.

Looking round Hong Kong, similar errors are common, yet English is an official language that all children learn for nine years in school. To be fair, English is not the Mother tongue (or, equally importantly, the Father tongue, isn't that sexist phraseology?) of ninety-something percent of the population. There is a lot of discussion about whether English standards are falling, why they are falling, and what can be done about it. I make the following observations:

So, what I intend to do here is to poke fun at these errors, and I invite you to join in. Send an email, describe the error, include a picture, if possible, and a correction if you can. Make fun of the error, DON'T make fun of the writer, we're trying to be polite and helpful. If you can laugh at your own mistake, you are going to remember it, and, hopefully, learn from it. Official notices and mistakes by organisations that should know better are preferred, but anything funny enough will be considered.

There is no guarantee that the "corrections" on this site, or the explanations, will be accurate. I'm a native English speaker, but not a language expert. At times, when I hear or read something, I'll feel, "that's wrong", but I have difficulty explaining why. Also, English is a living, changing language. Some parts of the world, North America, India, Australia, Yorkshire, Scotland and others, have strong dialects or accents. They are not "wrong".

Oh, so what was the error? Well, the sign was an instruction and a consequence, [do this] for [that], like "queue here for food" - that is where you get the food, so that is where to get a payment. The correct phrase would be "Queue here to pay", using a verb (to pay), instead of a noun (payment), [do this] [to do that].

Allan Dyer