Pink wedding cake sports four tires??

Spell checker is a wonderful tool. However, if you misspell a word in a way that creates another legitimate word, spell checker will not catch the error for you.

Here is a good typo example from the wedding column in The Birmingham News for Sunday, May 31:

Lydia's four-tired, light pink wedding cake was decorated in white fleur de lis.

I would imagine the columnist meant to write "four-tiered." TIRE is a word, and TIER is a word, but my guess is this wedding cake had four tiers rather than four tires. Spell checker would not point out the error.

REMEMBER: After running spell checker, always proofread again with your brain in gear!

Did you bail out OR get a bailout?

This point has come up before, but apparently it needs mentioning again. It is important to recognize the difference between verb and noun forms of similar words. Here is a good example from Gary Bauer's "Campaign for Working Families; End of Day Report" for May 20, 2009. In it, he made the following comment:

“Sadly, it is far more likely that the people of Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska, North Carolina and elsewhere will be taxed to bailout California’s failed experiment in Big Government.”

Whoops! "Bailout" is the NOUN form, as in, "That bank just got another bailout." What Mr. Bauer needed was the VERB form because he was placing it after "to" to create an infinitive phrase. He should have written:

“Sadly, it is far more likely that the people of Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska, North Carolina and elsewhere will be taxed to bail out California’s failed experiment in Big Government.”

Mom or Dad = singular verb

I enjoy keeping up with Stephen Colbert's antics on Comedy Central. One of his shows this week included this phrase:

...while Mom or Dad are fighting for you....

Whoops! If it's Mom OR Dad, not both of them together, fighting for you, then the verb should be singular. The phrase should read as follows:

...while Mom or Dad is fighting for you....

In spite of the grammar glitch, Colbert has a great charity challenge on his show right now. He wants viewers to vote for the branch of the service they want a contribution to go to--Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard. So far, the Coast Guard is lagging in votes.

What is great about this challenge is that the money goes to projects at the SCHOOLS attended by children of men and women serving in these military branches. If you'd like to participate, go to http://www.donorschoose.org/ and make a contribution while voting for one branch of the service.

Right now, either the Air Force or the Coast Guard needs more votes to stay off the bottom of the list.

Whoops! A Poll I Run Two Years Ago??

As I've said before, I enjoy keeping up with the ProBlogger and all of his wonderful suggestions for improving my blog. I've also had a little fun catching ProBlogger with some grammar glitches. Here is a new one from a week or so ago:



This is a poll I run two years ago.



I pointed out in one of my recent blogs that it's important to be aware of the proper forms of verbs in English. They don't always follow a logical pattern, as with the forms of RUN. They are RUN, RAN, RUN. I agree that the more logical forms might be RIN, RAN, RUN (kind of like SING, SANG, SUNG or RING, RANG, RUNG), but that's not the case.



RUN is present tense, as in "I RUN errands every morning." RAN is past tense, as in "This is a poll I RAN two years ago." And RUN is ALSO the past participle that is used with helping verbs like HAVE and HAS, as in "I have RUN that marathon every year since 1990." Or, "She has RUN that marathon every year."



ProBlogger should have written his sentence this way (in the PAST tense):



This is a poll I ran two years ago.



By the way, I'd like to welcome members of the AUM Campus Police to the readship of this blog. They participated in a business writing workshop in Montgomery, Alabama, this week, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with them. Welcome! Like everyone else, they are welcome to post comments with questions for future posts.

Whoops! USA Today Crossword Clue Needs Spell Checker!

Usually, crossword puzzle clues are correct when it comes to spelling and grammar. In fact, I often recommend them as good practice for workshop participants who want to improve their writing skills.

Unfortunately, today's USA Today crossword puzzle has a glaring spelling error in the #11 Down clue.

Remember that old elementary school rhyme, "I before E except after C"?

Most of the time, it is a good rule of thumb.

Kevin Donovan forgot the rule and forgot to check spell checker before he wrote "Student acheiver" for the #11 Down clue. Then Timothy Parker forgot to correct it when he edited the puzzle.

The clue should read: "Student achiever." In case you check out the puzzle on page 7D in the Life section of USA Today, the answer is "letterman."

WHOOOO? or WHOOOOM?

It is often difficult to decide when to use WHO and when to use WHOM. Fortunately, this is not as frequent a problem in contemporary usage, but it still comes up from time to time.

The basic rule is that WHO goes in the subject slot and WHOM goes in the object slot. You have simple sentences like these:

Who is in charge of this project?

To whom were you speaking?

Things get a little muddier when you have a complex sentence where WHO or WHOM is part of a secondary clause. Look at this example from a recent Letter to the Editor in a local newspaper:

We also need to censure whomever drafted and carried out these terrible decisions.

At first glance (which is probably all the letter writer gave it), this appears to be correct. "WHOMEVER" seems to be the object of the preposition "to."

Actually, it is the WHOLE SECONDARY CLAUSE "whoever drafted and carried out these terrible decisions" that is the object of "to." Therefore, "whoever" is the SUBJECT of that secondary clause.

The sentence should read as follows:

We also need to censure whoever drafted and carried out these terrible decisions.

By the way, you should also be careful about the words "censure," "censor," and "sensor." They have very different meanings. Check your dictionary. If you'd like a post about using them, please send me a comment.

Be Careful with Verb Forms

Microsoft Office has a new e-mail newsletter for those of us who have Vista and Office 2007. It offers great tips on using the programs, but the second newsletter had a grammar glitch right at the beginning:

This one's about things you can do that you might not have know you can do.

Whoops! If you use the helping verb "have" with the verb "know," it is necessary to use the past participle form of the verb. The principal parts of KNOW are KNOW (present tense),KNEW (past tense), and KNOWN (past participle for use with most helping verbs).

Therefore, the Office 2007 sentence should read as follows:

This one's about things you can do that you might not have known you can do.

Unless you go back and study the linguistic history of modern English, there does not appear to be rhyme or reason to many of the principal parts of verbs (BRING, BROUGHT, BROUGHT but SING, SANG, SUNG or TEACH, TAUGHT, TAUGHT but WRITE, WROTE, WRITTEN.

You just need to learn them. If you have questions about any verb forms, please leave a comment, and I will check them for you.