Grammar cop on the beat, again...

Le peeve du jour:

I just heard it again: there was an annoying error in word usage in a television commercial -- so rare an occurrence!

This time, it was something about the Maya calendar, wherein "the magnetic poles of the earth reverse and hurtle us into space."  Fellas, I hate to break it to you, really, but something can not "hurtle" something else.  "Hurtling" is an intransitive verb, which means there is no object to it.  I may hurtle.  A stone, a train, an asteroid may hurtle, but we do it ourselves, and not to something else, but only toward something or somebody.

If you wanted to indicate that the earth's gravitational switch might send us all hurtling into space, but that was too many words for your thirty-second work of art on the airwaves, might I suggest you opt for the more correct (and slightly briefer) "hurling"?   That word is not exclusively translated to mean some unpleasant effect of excesses of food or drink, after all.  Although, having heard your advertisement for the umpteenth time, I'm concerned lest that particular excess also cause said transitive action by me, with pie.

In the meantime, I will hurtle toward the mute button next time I see that ad come up on my screen.

Locals eat worms and minnows

According to our small-town rag, that is. Relevant quote (emphasis added):

MONMOUTH - Everyone who has been battling for funding for U.S. Highway 34 is waiting with baited-breath to see if the first capital bill in years in Illinois passes.

Um. Stacey. When you're holding your breath, it's not "baited," it's "bated" -- as in abated. But I won't hold my breath for corrections.

This should be noted by the many others who can't tell the difference between worm-eating and breathless-with-anticipation, as well. Some of you even know who you are.

It's not that kind of bee

Yesterday's local paper ran a piece from the AP in anticipation of this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee, about the challenge of finding the right words for the contest. Paragraph three, though, shows Joseph White is a little out of his league (emphasis and link mine):

The young competitors have spent months poring over word lists and dictionaries, probing the depths of entomology in an attempt to answer one nagging question: What strange word is Carolyn Andrews going to come up with next?

It would seem the author needs some time to brush up on his vocabulary, starting with etymologies.

What not to say in a bank "spoof e-mail"

Recently, I received one of those spoof mails -- the ones which give a web link and advise you to go directly there to correct your account -- saying my bank account was in danger of having "been accessed by an unauthorized third party." This, to me, was exciting, because I don't have an account with any bank, right now. As far as the monetary world goes, I'm a non-person.

And, yet, this agency sought me out to "correct" my account.

But wait -- it gets better.

The warning at the bottom of the message informed me that I need to

update your records on or before 48 hours, a failure to update your records will result in a temporal hold on your funds.

Needless to say, I was concerned. Not only were they messing with grammar, by making a run-on sentence out of two complete sentences and not joining them with, for example, a semicolon or a dash, but they threaten a "temporal [earthly] hold" on my (nonphysical, ergo clearly only spiritual) funds. With my ethereal wherewithal grounded, I fear I shall suffer a lack of whimsy, a lack of felicity, a lack of joy in my Noël.

Or, perhaps they simply meant there might be an ephemeral lock. No worries, then. My fancy can pick those, any day.

Oh, yes. They also said, "Tank you for your patience". I don't think there's any need for them to have gotten rude. Whether they intend to force me into a large container or run me over with a piece of military machinery, that's no way to talk to a prospective patsy.

What language problem?

I do not go insane over others' grammatical errors. I do not go insane over others' grammatical errors. I do not...

Okay, I do.

But I think I'm justified, at least in the case of the errant apostrophe.

I'm not going to complain too heartily about bloggers who put the darned thing where it shouldn't go, and who leave it out of crucial positions. I probably should, but blogging is so off-the-cuff that I often make errors, myself, and don't catch them until I've re-read them a week later. Blogging is public diary writing, occasionally with a purpose. In many cases, it's also a verbal sparring arena, in which you're allowed to get rough with words.

But last night, I saw a wandering apostrophe make its way into inappropriate position, in the midst of a professionally-produced television commercial. This was not some ad scrabbled together by the sales department of the local television station, or even by a community college student working toward an associate's degree in video graphics. The advertisement featured high-end(ish) computer graphics and professional models in quality, fashionable clothing, for a respectable (?!) department store.

On the layer-upon-layer of supposed sale catalogs from other stores, Gordmans (no apostrophe) discount department store chain has labeled the competitors' flyers as "THEIR'S".

I suppose if one has chosen to eschew an apostrophe in one's own business name, one might have no understanding of where it might go in other applications, such as with pronouns. But a simple rule might be applied -- a rule even the least linguistically adept blogger among us might be able to recall:

Possessive Pronouns show ownership and never need apostrophes.

If you're still not sure what this means, pretend there is a masculine gender to the object in question. If the chosen pronoun ("she", "it", "they") can be replaced by "he is" or "he has", it is not possessive, and asks for an apostrophe ("she is"= "she's"). If the article is replaceable by "his"... no apostrophe belongs. So, "their's" is comparable to "hi's". "Their's" is not a word. It is faulty communication.

Also, then, "it's" equals "it is", and not "something belonging to it".

When it comes to the apostrophe accompanying a pronoun, it's not that difficult to remember its status.

Your tax dollars -- and journalist's grammar -- at play

The Galesburg Register-Mail tells us that the Dept of Ag has been giving out money without proper procedure, involving incomplete paperwork and such other omissions. In the AP article's first paragraph, it says:

The Agriculture Department on Wednesday acknowledged making improper payments to farmers worth more than $2.8 billion last year.

What I want to know is, why would a farmer worth more than $2.8 billion need money from the gummint, anyway? Yer darn tootin' it's improper! The regular Joe-Bobs need it more!

Jeepers!


My pet peeve: the author of the article also used "loan" as a verb: "...the agency loaned $9 million over six years to farmers who shouldn't have gotten loans." Ew. The word you were looking for, friend, is "lent" -- like the Catholic season of sacrifice, but lower case and secular. They were Money Lenders, not loaners.