Category: grammar

Doesn’t anyone care?

November 20, 2014 • 12:09 pm

Every time I take the bus, as I did today returning from the Rugby Scrum, I’m forced to see this:

Bus label

Doesn’t anyone care that this policy gives priority only to customers with two characteristics: they have a disability and are with a senior? Don’t they see that they could easily fix it by simply changing the wording to say “seniors and customers with disabilities”?  “Priority seating is for customers who are seniors or have disabilities.” (I knew I’d screw this up!)

WWPD?*

I’m sure I’ve posted this exact sign before, but I’m too lazy to look it up.

_______
What Would Pinker Do?

 

An important New York Times correction about bird poop

August 20, 2014 • 8:18 am

I can’t resist posting this tw**t from Nick Bilton, a columnist for the New York Times (sent by reader Barry):

Screen Shot 2014-08-20 at 10.11.27 AM

And a screenshot of the correction in situ:

Screen Shot 2014-08-20 at 10.08.29 AM

And here’s the original error, appearing in a column called “My life in bicycles,” by Jennifer Finney Boylan:

I prefer exercising at least two miles away from any other human being. For me, biking is a solitary activity. In the Kennebec Highlands, on my mountain bike, I pedal past Kidder Pond, up to the blueberry barrens high atop Vienna Mountain. From there, I watch bald eagles and ospreys, and other birds, whose poop, owing to their diet of berries, stains the gray rocks purple. Sometimes I’ve run into deer and porcupines, and on one memorable occasion, a moose. Another time, I lay with my back against a tree, watching a beaver build a dam in Boody Pond.

In fact, the passage seems ambiguous, for the purple poop might be attributed to the “other birds” rather than the eagles and ospreys.  However, and perhaps a grammarian can weigh in here, the common between “and other birds” and “whose poop” might imply that eagles, ospreys, and “other birds” are a set, all producing purple poop. It would have been less ambiguous without that comma. Where’s Pinker when we need him?

 

Synechdoches I hate

August 15, 2014 • 8:31 am

“Boots on the ground” is today’s overused phrase.  Why not simply “soldiers”? Or “troops”? This shopworn phrase is even longer than the simpler alternative. It serves only one purpose: to make someone look like they’re either politically or militarily in the know.

I can see it now—a report about Coachella or Burning Man that says, “There will be an estimated ten thousand Birkenstocks on the ground.”

And while we’re at it, what is this “on the ground” business? How many news stories do we see that say, “The facts on the ground are . . . “? Are there other kinds of facts, like facts in the air: perhaps the number of airplanes in combat?

Get off my lawn!

They couldn’t help themselves

February 7, 2014 • 12:08 pm

While reading the famous 840-page anti-accommodationist book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) by Andrew Dickson White (the first president of Cornell University and a promoter of Christianity who simply hated its incursion into science), I came across the following emendation by a previous reader:

P1050389

Now I don’t even know if that correction is grammatically necessary, but I had to smile at the anonymous reader who got annoyed and took the trouble to add the proofreader’s transposition symbol.

Can you write proper English under pressure?

November 18, 2013 • 8:38 am

Well, I thought I could, as I have to write these posts between 6 and 8 a.m. every day, and there’s precious little time for revising.  Then reader Diane G. called my attention to a timed online test at usvsth3m called “You can’t write proper English under pressure.” What a challenge.

There are eight tests, each consisting of about ten timed questions, and you don’t have much time to judge a sentence as either “right” or “wrong”.  An example:

Picture 5

That looks easy, right?  Well it is, but things become harder when the time to answer becomes shorter, as it does within each section.  As Diane noted:

A bit harder than it looks in some sections.  Beware of the autoplay music;  I turned it off immediately, though that was probably supposed to be part of the challenge.

At the end, I thought I did pretty well, but was horrified to see a big sign on the screen giving the final judgment: “You can’t write proper English.” I failed! I am totally humiliated.

Click on the link above, use your mouse to judge sentences right or wrong, and see if you can do better. Then report the results below.

Sentence structure fail

August 16, 2013 • 3:57 pm

Watching the national news (which in the U.S. has an elderly audience), I saw a commercial for Celebrex, an arthritis medicine. And I was startled to hear this sentence:

“Patients taking aspirin and the elderly are at risk for stomach bleeding and ulcers.”

Really? Patients are taking the elderly along with aspirin? Perhaps they’re misguided atheists who don’t know they’re supposed to be taking babies.

Doesn’t anybody vet these commercials for grammar?

UPDATE: The same error is in print on the Celebrex site:

Serious skin reactions, or stomach and intestine problems such as bleeding and ulcers, can occur without warning and may cause death. Patients taking aspirin and the elderly are at increased risk for stomach bleeding and ulcers.