NAMES IN THE NEWS : Disney Cited for Bad Grammar
Walt Disney Pictures is the winner of the 1989 Dunce Cap Award by SPELL, the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature, for the popular film, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”
It should have been “Honey, I Shrank the Kids.”
SPELL, a 2,000-member, nonprofit organization based in Mountain View, Calif., confers the annual awards on “perpetrators of especially egregious errors in usage, spelling and punctuation inflicted on the public’s sensibilities.”
A Disney official defended the use of “shrunk.”
“It was done deliberately. It was not an error,” said the official who wouldn’t give his name. “That’s what Rick Moranis, the father in the movie, says: ‘Honey, I shrunk the kids.’ The title was taken from that.”
And it worked, the official said: The film grossed more than $129 million.
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