Hi FF fans! The Grammar Cop welcomes you back for another edition of Friday Follies, otherwise unofficially known as “Find the Flub”! So here you go:

1. For every scammer on the internet posing as a member of WHO begging for cash there is social media groups organizing to make sure their senior neighbours are not left all by themselves in these trying times.
2. Nobody, not even Sophie, have any idea why the Prime Minister grew the sprinkled grey beard in the first place while on a family vacation in Costa Rica in January.
3. Israel carried out over 11,000 coronavirus testes in past two days, data shows (headline in Haaretz)

And the corrections:

1. See what this sentence looks like with two repairs: For every scammer on the internet posing as a member of WHO begging for cash, there are social-media groups organizing to make sure their senior neighbours are not left all by themselves in these trying times. Note that “there is social media groups” becomes: there are social-media groups. You need the plural verb are because it has to agree with the plural noun groups. We also added a comma after “cash” since the reader has to stop for breath at some point just like in this sentence which is also meandering and threatening to get lost. (We would put one in after “point.”)
2. Can we explain what the plural verb “have” is doing there? I’ll tell you: it’s giving the Grammar Cop a headache. It should be the singular “has,” to agree with “nobody” which is singular. Sophie is also singular. She’s a very special woman. She’s Canada’s “first lady”!
3. As many of you know, the Grammar Cop normally doesn’t talk about typos. If she did, she’d never get any other work done! But the typo here is especially FUNNY! Obviously the writer meant to say “coronavirus tests.” Let’s just leave it at that. 😆 We can also be picky and insist that “data shows” should be data show, because data is the plural of datum. But it would probably look odd to readers who never took Latin in high school for four miserable years.

Did you manage to find the errors today? I hope it wasn’t too difficult a test! Haha, see you next Friday! Have a great week.