In your Rails validations, you can add errors to base or to a specific attribute. When you add errors to an attribute, the full error messages (used e.g. by error_messages_for) are prepended by the (humanized) attribute name.

Sometimes this isn't what I want. Here's a quick hack to not prepend the attribute name if the error message starts with an upper case character.

Just stick this in lib/less_full_error_messages.rb, and require that file from environment.rb:

class ActiveRecord::Errors
  def full_messages
    full_messages = []

    @errors.each_key do |attr|
      @errors[attr].each do |msg|
        next if msg.nil?

        if attr == "base" || msg =~ /^[[:upper:]]/
          full_messages << msg
        else
          full_messages << @base.class.human_attribute_name(attr) + " " + msg
        end
      end
    end
    full_messages
  end
end

Now,

errors.add('name', "is just silly") if name.just_silly?
errors.add('born_at', "You're too young") if age < AGE_LIMIT

will result in the full error messages

Name is just silly
You're too young