Friday Follies #185 – Making Grammar Great Again, One Hyphen at a Time

Welcome back, gang! Ready for another bunch o’ beastly boo-boos? Well, you’ve come to the right place!

  1. “Offering 24/7 Nurses’ aids- custom care at every level”
  2. “If there is a dispute over who’s property the fence is on, make sure you notify your title insurance company.”
  3. “Her half-finished shawl revealed large patches of red and only slithers of green, providing a clear visual representation of the disparity still at play.” (The illustration with the article shows part of a scarf with thin green rows interspersed with a lot of red ones.)

 

The corrections:

  1. This description is a tad misleading, as the nurses don’t have “aids”! The word is not “aid” (meaning help), but Aide with an e on the end, meaning assistant. Also Aide is capitalized, as it is part of the job title. If the Grammar Cop is feeling extra picky, she would also tell the author to put a space after Aides and then an en dash (it’s longer than a hyphen). So you’d have: Offering 24/7 Nurses’ Aides – custom care at every level.
  2. The possessive form of “who” is not “who’s” – it’s whose. Yes, it’s one of those darn irregular words. So it’s: …whose property the fence is on…
  3. Hmm. “Slithers of green”… it might work for a green snake, but there’s no snake here!😄  The writer – battling an apparent fog of confusion, should have said slivers of green.

The Grammar Cop is slithering off to her loveseat now, along with her SO John & her kitty Annie, for another rousing (recorded) episode of Jeopardy! See you next week!

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