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Have you ever stared into an exploding sun, forcing yourself to keep your eyes open as wave after wave of white-hot light seared your corneas? Well I have!
I didn’t literally stare into an exploding sun, but I did hear from literally hundreds of readers eager to share the grammatical errors that drive them mad (figuratively speaking). In fact, I received so many emails, that as of this writing, I still haven’t read them all! I apologize if I haven’t gotten to yours yet.
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It all started when I recently wrote about an ad for Burger King that includes a graphic with a wrong-way-round apostrophe. Insisting that apostrophes be the right way around is a hill I’m willing to die on. I asked readers: What’s your death hill?
And then the sun exploded.
The responses were varied, but a few themes emerged. Many readers can’t understand why so many people can’t get it right when it comes to its/it’s. Then there is the there/their/they’re cohort. Those words are not interchangeable!
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Seeing “data” treated as a singular noun has other readers looking for torches and pitchforks. These people scream every time they read, “The data shows an increase in acorns.”
Matt LeBlanc of Fort Wayne, Ind., fights a different battle. “From your space there on Mount Apostrophe, it’s my hope that you can see me entrenched on a nearby embankment: Mount Fewer,” he wrote.
Matt described Mount Fewer as a “shady, leafy place that in recent years has been overrun with Less vermin. The Less threaten to make extinct the Fewer who for eons have lived simple, earnest lives dedicated to accurate portrayals of amounts and counts that are not absolute.
“Like the humble apostrophe, use of ‘fewer’ and ‘less’ is not that hard — and that is why incorrect use of either makes me cringe.”
Matt provided a few simple examples illustrating how fewer is generally used to describe plural nouns, less to describe singular nouns: “Less traffic. Fewer cars.” “Fewer baseball bats. Less equipment in the dugout.”
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The District’s Peggy Robin is a brave warrior in the “I/me” army, trying to stamp out the usage of “for so-and-so and I” when it should instead be “for so-and-so and me.”
Peggy insists it shouldn’t be hard.
“You don’t need to know a thing about the nominative case vs. the objective case,” she wrote. “You discover which one is right simply by removing the other person and listening to what it sounds like. Example: ‘It’s good for you and I to speak up.’ Remove the ‘you,’ and now listen: You would never say ‘It’s good for I.’”
People need to remember, she said, that there is never anything “for I” or “with I” or “to I” or “about I.”
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Wrote Peggy: “You can have a dozen or more names after the preposition, and they all must be followed by ‘and me.’ I shout this at newscasters and talk show hosts on TV at least five times a week.”
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Katy Pace Byrd of Lakeland, Fla., also watches TV somewhat interactively.
“During my television watching hours, I may be heard shouting ‘lee’ at whichever pundit or reporter happens to be speaking,” she wrote. “Of course, I am referring to the ‘ly’ that the speaker is chopping of his or her adverbs.”
Pundit: “Wow! Congress got rid of Kevin McCarthy quick!”
Katy: “Lee!”
Wrote Katy: “The spouse has been trained to shout ‘lee’ at appropriate times too, so we create a nice choral effect. I am sad to think that the War of the Adverb may have been lost. But I pledge to fight on, vigorously!”
In my earlier column I pointed out that it is impossible to write an article about grammatical mistakes without making one yourself. It’s a karmic glass houses/throwing stones sort of thing. I illustrated the principle in that column by writing “If I was to quote a Cockney.” Many helpful readers noted it should have been, “If I were to quote a Cockney.”
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As far as I know, Kathy Dean isn’t a Cockney. She lives in Daphne, Ala., where, several years ago, she passed a property company billboard on her afternoon commute. She can’t recall the exact wording, but the text included an “it’s” that should have been an “its.”
Wrote Kathy: “I tried to ignore it, but it’s like trying to ignore the car wreck along the side of the road. I wouldn’t — I couldn’t — let it go. I had to take action.”
Kathy called the company and left a message on its answering machine along the lines of: “How can I trust your real estate firm to handle the details of a home sale when you can’t even get your billboard right?”
She included a long-winded lesson on proper “its” usage.
Wrote Kathy: “A few weeks later, the billboard had been updated with the correct ‘its.’ This is my grammar victory story. It's a win for its, one billboard at a time.”
Tomorrow: Readers share more grammatical hills on which to die.
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