The Red Pencil Diaries return this week with five more reviews culled from the primordial grammatical muck that is Yelp Orange County. It's truly amazing what people will write and then attach their names to. You'd think that they'd realize that Yelp is social media like any other, that Yelp reviews sometimes show up in social media background checks for employment, and that proofreading is a valuable use of time when putting your public face out there. Read on…
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Jonathan N.'s 5-star review of SOTA:
I don't know who Sushi S. is, but he or she is in big trouble, because the potty-mouthed Newport Beach Urban Thug Patrol is on the case and Jonathan N. is on the case with the badly minced swear words, the ad hominem insults, the completely unnecessary use of the words “main thang”, and the reference to testosterone shots.
Oh, and then there's the whole “faggot” thing. What are you, twelve? My classmates used that in school thirty years ago. Welcome to 2013, where that word isn't an all-purpose expression for things you scorn. It's hard to take someone seriously who thinks “gay” is an insult.
Then there are the problems with the content of the review itself. If you can smush yellowtail against your hard palate without biting it, you're getting old fish. “A dab of some sauce” doesn't help us in the slightest, especially when it's followed by “zingy, piney, minty, pow”.
This has to be a joke review. Otherwise, I wasted time reading this review that would make a high school sophomore blush in embarrassment, and I'm still wasting time trying to figure out what bi**c could possibly stand for.
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Ema I.'s 1-star review of Las Brisas de Apatzingan:
It's frustrating to have a language barrier–we'll save the English-only jeremiads for the retrograde, self-nominated Keepers of American Culture in the comment sections of the Orange County Register–but this review reads like the dreaded Orange County stereotype, the person who ventures into big bad scary SanTana, pitches up at an actual Mexican restaurant, and freaks out because it's not a combo-plate place.
“Too authentic”? Open your mind a little bit.
Eric T.'s 5-star review of Boon Docks Cocktails:
This is a rare example of a creative review that actually works; you get a sense of the bar, you get a sense of the ambiance, and it made me smile. You get a Red Pencil gold star, Eric T.
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Wendy T.'s 5-star review of 49'rs Tavern:
This is actually written well, with sentence structure, punctuation, grammar, and actual content to the review, but I'm confused by one statement. If they don't have a kitchen, where did the burger come from? Also, while this isn't your fault, Wendy, I'd like to point out that pendejo, besides its all-occasions usefulness as an insult, means pubic hair. You ordered a pubic hair burger.
Steven N.'s 5-star review of Lascari's Italian Cucina:
This review is a great example of a perfectly valid opinion rendered completely useless by its writer's complete inability to construct a sentence. The worst problem isn't the grammar (“my fiance and I's”?) or the strange spacing (“to share with eachother” would make James Joyce proud); no, it's the manic-depressive punctuating. It's like he used a bunch of commas and a colon, then got freaked out about the punctuation budget and wrote a run-on sentence, made worse by his broken shift key.
Be warned: if it's hard to read your review, people won't read it.
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