Sigh. Someone Didn’t Pay Attention in Fourth Grade English Class

That’s the year they taught us about contractions, right? Maybe it was seventh grade when we learned about verb forms.

“Must HAVE,’ class! Or even “must’ve”! But NOT “must of”! Pay attention!

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Different error than we saw two days ago, but worse than usual. I won’t embarrass anyone by naming the source, because the source would be really embarrassing. Here’s the guilty sentence:

• After a long career as editorial cartoonist at The Globe and Mail, Brian Gable announced this morning his retirement to its’ readers. 

ITS’ ???!!! That’s wrong twice! The posessive form, which this is supposed to be, has no apostrophe, and the contraction (for “it is”) has the apostrophe before the “s.”

Harrumpf! For shame! (It has to be a typo. These guys would not do this on purpose.)

Maybe I’m being picky, but the second time you refer to yourself in a sentence, you should use “myself,” not “me.” Even though “me” feels right when you’re being informal.

I’ve had this blog for long enough that I’ve mentioned this before (see the search box on the right) but people do it correctly seldom enough that it’s worth mentioning when they get it right! Last panel:

Remember—

• Loan is the noun. It’s money.
• Lend is the verb. It’s what you do with that money.

I recommend against using adverbs (especially “very”) because a colorful verb makes for better writing (vivid, shorter). But English certainly has a lot of adverbs!

I admit you might find it harder to think up a vivid verb when we have such a big collection of adverbs just lying around being handy to use.