Great to ‘see’ you, FFers! The Grammar Cop welcomes you all, old and new to her lair. Check out these monstrous mistakes!

1. “Remembrance Day was preceeded by two other heart-wrenching hallmarks of history.”
2. “These three days reflect the horrors of what the politics of hate and the propogation of fear lead to…”
3. “Conservative media fit not only his angry, contrarian, and Roman Catholic side, but it had low barriers to entry—liberal media, by contrast, with its corporate hierarchies, was much harder to break into.”

The corrections:

1. “Preceeded” – this mistake should have been easy to catch with a spell-check program. Also, if you’re using Word, you can see that the word has a squiggly red line under it, meaning it’s spelled wrong!  It should be preceded.
2. Another spelling error: “propogation” should be propagation. This mistake and the one above it were found in the newspaper editor’s editorial; someone should have proofread it, don’t you think? Grrr.
3. Once again: The word media is plural. (The singular is medium.) So the sentence should be corrected as follows: Conservative media fit not only his angry, contrarian, and Roman Catholic side, but they had low barriers to entry; liberal media, by contrast, with their corporate hierarchies, were much harder to break into. (Also please note that the semi-colon is better than a dash here, when connecting two related sentences. It gives more of a sense of finality after “to entry.”)

That’s it for this week, gang. Gotta dash —