Friday Follies #97 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time

~ Ellie

Howdy, Friday Follies followers! (Say that ten times fast.) The Grammar Cop has corralled several gaffes for you to mull over today. C’mon over to the boo-boo barn and get a load of these wrong words!

  1. THEWEATHERNETWORK.COM: “On June 17, substantial amounts of rock from the Karrat Fjord plunged into the sea, causing water to raise to at least 90 m (300 ft.) at the coast of the shallow inlet.”
  2. MONTREALGAZETTE.COM: “…as she mines the tension between digital and traditional media (at one point, performing funeral rights for traditional media – ‘Amen’)…”
  3. THEHUFFINGTONPOST.COM: “But the shear number of high-profile dismissals and departures in Trump’s orbit so early in his presidency…”

 

And the corrections:

Oh, just before I give them to you, I’d like to point out a frequent sight I behold regarding such errors on many online media: The day after I spot the mistake, someone’s wised up and corrected it! (Perhaps due to another Grammar Cop pointing it out?) But I’m here to tell you that I have saved all the original errors I see for posterity. Yes indeed, and I am making examples of them here so that you’ll learn not to repeat the same ugliness in your own writing. Just throw money. 😀 Now here we go.

  1. The word “raise” is not the one you want here. “Raise” is only used as a transitive verb, meaning that it always takes an object. You raise something up. But here, you need rise.
  2. Funeral “rights”? You only have a “right” to a funeral if you’re dead. Then, the funeral parlour will organize funeral rites for you. Isn’t that right? 😉
  3. You may shear off a piece of material. You may use shears. Your plane may (I hope not!) experience wind shear. But you do not have a “shear” number of anything! The word needed here is sheer, which in this context means “without qualification or exception: e.g. sheer stupidity; sheer happiness.”*

Thanks for dropping by! Tune in again next Friday for another collection of mistaken muddles. Or muddled mistakes. Yeah, those.

 

*from thefreedictionary.com

14 thoughts on “Friday Follies #97 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time”

  1. 1-If they were attempting to get a rise out of this mermaid they did. Raise in water, hmph!
    2-If the Gazette does not get their grammar right, there may be funeral rites, indeed!
    3-No doubt the abundant cuts in personnel made the writer think of shears! 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      1. I am positive my eldest sister Muriel would be very good at grammar. She is a teacher. I remember when we started on our cruise, she told the cruise director off as he had not written it correctly. He said English was not his first language, which to me was fair enough. It certainly caused some laughs on the cruise.

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