A Letter I’ve never heard Anyone Pronounce

—But they’re supposed to write it! See? I just did!

I guess I can hardly plame him for saying “I’m suppose to” but it’s still wrong.

PS—I just ran into another example, from Facebook. Someone just said (wrote):

• Can you smell the lamb chops…grilling in Nov. We can get use to this weather.

That should be “get used to.”

And don’t forget the correct spelling of a nice veggie: brussels sprouts.

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Real and hungry are indeed adjectives, and really is an adverb. And we’re supposed to modify adjectives with adverbs.

Though I gotta admit that “real hungry” sounds okay. Still, you sound classier if you say it correctly.

At least I think this is unusual. Normally you can put the separable verb’s adverb right after the main verb or at the end of the sentence, and you get basically the same meaning. But here’s an example of doing that, and getting the opposite meaning!

Can you think of any similar examples?

The humor is based on the misuse of three words, which I call puns. But the lesson is about the sentence. Can you tell what she got wrong?

Yes! She wrote a complex sentence, not a compound one. Ignoring the joke, the sentence is “When a horse jumps the fence” is a subordinate clause, and the rest of the sentence is the independent clause. “The feet go over first” is the main clause, and “then the tail” is an adverbial prepositional phrase. No compound anywhere!

How would you write those three words in a compound sentence?

Actually, the term mixed metaphor applies to any figure of speech that you get wrong. Here’s a metaphor:

The correct metaphor is to jump through hoops. What’s the figure of speech that goes with bells and whistles?