Here is one your spell checker won't catch!

Many of us no longer worry much about spelling because we know we can run a spell checker and catch most things. However, we still must be careful that our misspelling does not turn out to be another correctly spelled word. If it does, spell checker will not know the difference.

I enjoy reading the Wedding feature in The Birmingham News on Sundays. It's fun to see how couples met and planned their lives together. Here is a sentence from the one last week, in which the bride describes what she thought the first time she met her husband-to-be in a desktop publishing class:

He's very charming. He's a gentlemen."

I'm sure the reporter who wrote this wedding column knows the difference between GENTLEMAN and GENTLEMEN and simply made a typing error. However, if she ran spell check, she didn't catch the error because GENTLEMEN is also a word.

Since we are talking about one "he" in this sentence, it should read as follows:

He's very charming. He's a gentleman.

I do hope they live happily ever after!

2009 Agreement Glitch III

The Alfa magazine, Friends & Family, features an interesting artist in its Winter 2008 issue. Todd Alan "paints" fantastic scenes of the Gulf Shores area with nothing but crayons, and the results are breathtaking.

Unfortunately, the magazine did not proofread carefully enough to catch a glaring subject/verb agreement problem in the first paragraph of the story.

And while the 44-year-old Minnesota native now calls Gulf Shores his home, his childhood love of art and crayons are what makes his creations so unusual and in such high demand.

The main subject of this sentence is LOVE, which is singular. "Of art and crayons" is a prepositional phrase that does not affect the relationship between LOVE and the verb, which should be IS.

The author seems to have had at least an inkling of this problem because she uses MAKES for the second verb. This sentence should read as follows:

And while the 44-year-old Minnesota native now calls Gulf Shores his home, his childhood love of art and crayons is what makes his creations so unusual and in such high demand.

New Year Begins with Agreement Glitches II

Internet home pages are not immune to grammar glitches. Take a look at this headline that appeared on my AT&T home page this week:


Ethiopian troops begins withdrawal from Somalia


TROOPS is plural. BEGINS is singular. This does not work. A simple way to avoid this problem is to remember that, if there is an S on the noun to make it plural, then there should NOT be an S on the verb to make it singular. Got it?


Ethiopian troops begin withdrawal from Somalia

New Year Begins with Agreement Glitches

It is a New Year, but we seem to have the same old grammar issues as last year. Here is an example from a photo caption in The Birmingham News this week:

The Knit Wit knitting group celebrates Christmas and say farewell to (a person) who is returning to India in early January.

GROUP is the subject of this sentence, but whoever wrote it does not seem to know whether to treat that word as singular or plural. The first verb CELEBRATES is singular, but the second verb SAY is plural.

Unfortunately, a writer cannot have it both ways. When a GROUP does something together, all acting as one, the verb should be singular. The sentence should read as follows:

The Knit Wit knitting group celebrates Christmas and says farewell to (a member) who is returning to India in early January.

Happy New Year, Everyone! Let's try to make it a green year and one with fewer grammar glitches.