This review of “Fear: Trump in the White House” should be called “Yuck: Gaffes in the Review.”

The Grammar Cop spied eight (8!) mistakes in one book review in a local weekly rag newspaper… and that’s not counting typos. Here’s a sampling:

1. “…there has been a whole tidal wave of books that has examined practically every aspect of his controversial presidency.”
2. “…the real fear that arises is how in less than two years in office, he has ran the presidency with a complete disregard for…”
3. “…there’s former high level staffers Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn and Rob Porter, who represented rare examples of…”

The corrections:

1. “that has examined” should be that have examined. We need the plural have to agree with the plural subject of the clause, which is books. (The subject of the clause is not “wave.” A wave doesn’t examine anything; the books do.)
2. “has ran” should be has run. To run is one of many irregular English verbs that don’t comply with the general rule which says that we form the present perfect tense by adding -ed to the word, as in she has started, she has laughed, he has dropped etc. Here’s an explanation from leo.stcloudstate.edu/grammar/tenses:

Present perfect tense describes an action that happened at an indefinite time in the past or that began in the past and continues in the present. This tense is formed by using has/have with the past participle of the verb. Most past participles end in -ed. Irregular verbs have special past participles that must be memorized.

3. Instead of “there’s,” a contraction for the singular “there is,” it should be the plural there are; the verb must agree with the plural “staffers.” Some astute Friday Follyites  among you might’ve also noticed a case of hyphen-o-phobia: “high level staffers” should be high-level staffers.

If your eyes haven’t glazed over yet, I wish you all a fun and relaxing week-end! 😀