Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Y-O-U-R...Y-OU-apostrophe R-E: they're as different as night and day...don't you think that night and day are different? What's wrong with you?

-Strongbad (click on the beefy arm in the last frame of the cartoon for this and other 'rhythm and grammar' tunes.)

The Guy got into another proofreading pissing contest the other day. Corrected some bad punctuation on a Christmas card he was typesetting, then had the job bounce back because the customer didn't like his removal of an apostrophe. My grammar ninja refused to budge on this, citing one of his unimpeachable sources (rule #9, to be precise).

I'll admit fully to having problems with punctuation: colons and semicolons in particular give me headaches. The use of the apostrophe/posessive vs plural puzzle seems a bit of a no-brainer, however.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

My wee wifey lost her last secretarial job for daring to correct a word usage error. If you insure something you are merely taking on financial liability, not ensuring that it will happen

12/13/05, 10:06 PM
Be said...

Boy oh boy, she must have bruised an awfully big ego.

We get weird verbalization of other parts of speech where I work: we must resolute the situation...how would you nomenclate that?

Lots of redundancies, too. I work in finance and hear routinely about how there's not enough income coming in. A new one that kind of took us all by surprise recently was the request I got from one VP to outline an outline.

Spelling? Har!

12/13/05, 10:51 PM
Anonymous said...

You can't resolute the situation if it wasn't soluted in the first place.

12/14/05, 12:01 AM
Be said...

Well, it's tough getting things soluted the first time 'round when you've got a Republican governor in office who cuts taxes, resulting in less income coming in.

Don't even get me started on our PO-ilization prodedures.

12/14/05, 9:03 AM

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