Hi again, Friday Follies followers. Oh, how the Grammar Cop wishes more publishers would hire proofreaders! Then our eyes would be spared the sight of these bungled boo-boos:

1. MONTREAL TIMES: “Checkout what’s in our Wednesday online edition!”
2. THE SUBURBAN (featuring two errors for the price of one sentence): “Protein is the most challenging, especially if your child choses to follow a vegan diet where they do not eat any animal products or bi products – no butter, eggs, milk or cheese.”
3. THE SUBURBAN (again): “Twenty two years after the Parizeau government decided to close down the city’s…”

And the corrections:

1. This sentence should say, Check out what’s in…  A place in a supermarket where you pay for your food is called a checkout counter. But when you want to use it as a verb, it’s check out. Two words. You are checking something out.
2. The present tense of the verb is not “chose,” it is choose. So it should be: if your child chooses to follow…  (The past tense is chose, with one “o.”) It’s true that many people get confused because the present tense of the word “lose” has only one “o.” But that’s a completely different word! Whoever said English was a logical language? Not I! 😀 The second mistake is: “bi products” – is the writer saying the products are bisexual? Probably not. They mean by-products. With a hyphen, please.
3. This one’s easy. It’s simply another case of hyphen-o-phobia. It should say Twenty-two years after… With numbers you always insert a hyphen. You’ll seldom be wrong!

I hope you all have a good week; the Grammar Cop will try to, at least until the next language infraction assaults her eyes. See you on September 29th!