A teacher gets it wrong, then right

Two essentially unrelated Luann comics, except they feature the same two characters, first in 2006, the second in 2007. First, Miss Phelps gets one of my pet peeves wrong:

“Lies” happens to be correct. However, she catches the error in the next comic:

And, to answer Mr. Fogarty’s question in the first strip, the future was considered to be behind us by the ancient Greeks. They pictured us as moving backwards through time, because you can see the past, but you can’t see the future!

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Do you know the difference between uninterested and disinterested? Laura does:

I like Adam @ Home because the strip reminds me of me. I’ve been a work-at-home writer for years, off and on, and I have a pretty good wife, who is also cute, though not blonde.

Uninterested: don’t care about it. Blasé.

Disinterested: don’t have a stake in the outcome. Impartial. A judge is supposed to be disinterested in the outcome of a trial.

Some words end in “s” that aren’t plurals. I’m not referring to well-known suffixes such as -ness, either. Neither do I refer to words that end in the ess sound, such as porpoise, or familiar s-ending words with well-known plurals such as glass, grass, pass, and gas.

Some words used to end in -s that we removed the ess sound from to make them sound singular. The most famous, perhaps, is pease, now singularized to pea and a new plural, peas.

I’ll let the comic explain about the rest:

I have seen “physic” in print (it’s now obsolete), and “gymnastic” as an adjective. But the point of this Candorville comic from Oct 12, 2013 is correct: fields of study (-ics) such as physics and mathematics are singulars, and they should get singular verbs.

Some words you’re not supposed to modify. These words are absolutes.

My favorite is “unique.” It means one of a kind, period. People use it to mean “interesting,” which admits of degrees. Your amount of interest can vary, but being one of a kind is exactly that, so something can’t be very unique. This guy is a scientist, but he’s not a grammar geek.

The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

I got this from an article in The Daily Galaxy back in June.

A few more absolutes: touching, contact, countable, complete. All these either are or aren’t. Can you add to the list?

I thought of a word that maybe you can modify an absolute with: almost. Though really, when you say “almost” referring to an absolute, you mean “not.”

I mentioned a relative of this error recently, but when I ran into this  comic, I figured I’d give you a choice of how to demonstrate your curmudgeonliness—if you care about this point of grammar, of course.

Wiley Miller, November 25, 2013. The comic is called Non Sequitur.