Friday Follies #228 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time

~ Ellie

It’s a hyphen-o-phobia bonanza today, gentlewomen and gentlemen! 😄

  1. Leaked memo reveals JetBlue will layoff staff on October 1 with employees who voluntarily quit…
  2. It is an all hands on deck moment, and the Daily Kos community has the opportunity to…
  3. 18-year old J.J. Mangina lived with his father for most of his childhood in the…

 

 

And the corrections are:

  1. One hyphen is needed in this headline. Can you guess where? No? The Grammar Cop will tell you: the word “layoff” is a noun. It is only a noun, a whole noun, and nothing but a noun. But when you lay off staff, we write the verb lay off as two separate words. Never “layoff staff.” (Nor is it lay-off staff. It just isn’t.)
  2. Here we’re missing a bunch o’ hyphens. A trio, in fact. It should say: It is an all-hands-on-deck moment… In this example, all-hands-on-deck is a compound adjective modifying the noun, moment.
  3. Same as in #2: In this case there is one missing hyphen between “year” and “old.”  But besides that, the writer broke another rule. It’s not correct to begin a sentence with numerals, in this case, the number “18.” We have to spell it out: Eighteen-year-old J.J. Mangina lived with…

The Grammar Cop has reached the end of her neat-as-a-pin-and-quick-as-a-bunny post! We wish you a 😀-as-a-clam week!

8 thoughts on “Friday Follies #228 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time”

  1. 1-Wait, what?? If the employees quit, how could they be laid off?
    2-It is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and the Daily Kos community has the opportunity to go to Grammar School.
    3-Tsk! Tsk! The-writer-should-have-known-better. 😀

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. 1)Heh, you sharp-eyed mermaid, you! It actually made sense before I chopped off the second half of the sentence. They’re laying off workers – except for those who quit first! (I seem to recall the piece explaining that people who voluntarily quit would somehow be better off than the laid-off people. Not sure. 😬)
      2)LOL!
      3)Haha! So-glad-MagickMermaid-is-on-top-of-her-grammar-classes!

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

        1. LOLOL! Oh sorreee! 😂 But – in my admittedly weak defence – when I end an excerpt with an ellipsis, that shows you that part of the sentence was omitted. 😬😜

          Liked by 1 person

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