After a storm, tornado, hurricane, flood, etc., bureaucrats assess damages. Speakers of English assess damage.

After a flood, one bureaucrat was quoted in the newspaper offering "a statement of damages from the storm events we had." He added that more money "would help us to recover some of the costs for the damages that occurred."

This kind of bureaucrat-speak is why God created paraphrasing, GrammarHell.com suggests. We'll simply wince at storm events and deal with damage/damages.

Garner's Modern American Usage notes that "the singular damage refers to loss or injury to person or property; the plural damages refers to monetary compensation for such a loss or injury."

The Associated Press Stylebooksays simply, "Damage is from destruction ... Damages are awarded as compensation for injury, loss, etc."

A tornado causes damage, followed by lawsuits seeking damages over shoddy construction.

Damage/damages errors are distressingly common as people follow the bureaucrats spewing this jargon. A quick run through Google News finds many, many examples of flood damages, storm damages, hurricane damages, tornado damages, tsunami damages, etc., etc., etc.

What a disaster.

Trying to bloc out time for a vacation? It'll never happen.

An alliance or alignment of people, groups, nations, investors, voters, etc., is a bloc. Block applies in any other case in which block or bloc is used. 

Odds are when you read voting block, Soviet block, communist block, Eastern block, economic block or political block, someone has made a boo-boo. 

Block as a noun covers "a quantity, number, or section of things dealt with as a unit," such as a block of time, according to Mirriam-Webster OnLine. 

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage lists people among the things that can be dealt with as a unit. Thus GrammarHell.com can't complain when the newspaper, as it did recently, says that candidates are "divvying up blocks of support." It's correct if the people within the blocks aren't aligned.

Among other meanings for block: a solid piece of material (block of wood); a heavy stand used for chopping; an obstruction. Block as a verb means, among other things, to obstruct, to mount or mold on a block or to sketch roughly.

It might help to keep in mind that bloc is never a verb. You'll never bloc out time.

An article says a certain state normally has so many millions of dollars each year to disperse to law enforcement. Unless officials plan to toss bills into the wind, letting cops run for them, the writer meant disburse.

This is a common error and warrants an especially involved entry in Garner's Modern American Usage. Disburse means to pay out, as from a fund. Disperse means to scatter or spread widely or in all directions.

Those with editors are as confused as anyone. You'll find dozens of errors (mixed in with some correct uses) when you run these queries in Google News: dispersed, disperse, dispersing money; dispersed, disperse, dispersing funds.

It works the other way as well. You'll find plenty of erroneous references on Google News to crowds that disbursed or disburse.

 This looks very cool:

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica will screen at film festivals, museums, design conferences, and cinemas worldwide, followed by the DVD release this fall. More about the film...

From the clips I've seen on youtube, the film moves between interviews and clips of Helvetica in our mental landscape. According to the filmaker, the montages, backed with incidental music, was the original conception of  the film — which was first conceived walking around NYC listening to an MP3 player. 

The film really illustrates how ubiquitous Helvetica is in our culture presently.

On a completely unrelated note, I put a quick typography note on the ellipsis on my other blog. Actually — I just wanted to see if the trackback option was working.

The New Yorker is my favourite. At its best, the writing in it is dizzyingly good. It's best feature are the clippings (which I learned are called newsbreaks, courtesy of this site).

They have been appearing in the New Yorker since its inception. They are submitted by readers and also fastidiously gathered by members of staff.

They were originally used when there were column inches remaining at the end of feature articles, but soon became a favourite feature in their own right. According to 'Ask the Librariians': "By the 1930s, readers were sending in as many as a thousand 'newsbreaks' a week; at that time, the magazine also employed staff members whose duties included scanning the daily newspapers for potential breaks."

Nowadays, the New Yorker receives far fewer clippings than itused to, and no one on staff is now employed to scan papers and other journals for potential scre ups. In spite of this, most of the clippings printed in The New Yorker still come from readers.

Very popular in these Newsbreaks were 'etaoin shrdlu'-sequences of letters that occur on a linotype machine. Often they came out such as: "Her name was given to the police as mari etoin".

See, the letters on Linotype keyboards were arrayed by letter frequency,

'Etaoin shrdlu' were the first two vertical columns on the left side of the keyboard. Linotype operators who had made a typing error could not easily go back to delete it, and had to finish the line before they could eject the slug and re-key a new one. Since the line with the error would be discarded and hence its contents didn't matter (and since the line needed to be filled to successfully pass through the casting unit), the quickest way to enter enough letters to finish it was to run a finger down the keys, creating this nonsense phrase.

After casting the final line of the story an operator placed the rejects in the empty assembler, filled the line by running a finger down the keys (with a spaceband between each line), added a few em spaces, and sent the line of mats through. Such lines would normally have been caught by the proofreaders or compositor.