Even Your Best Friends Won't Tell You

Or is that just what friends are for -- to tell you that there's something green caught between your front teeth before you walk into a room full of people or to mention that your deodorant seems to have failed before you leave for that all-important interview?

As an ex-English teacher, I am always jarred by faulty punctuation and misspellings. I'm not one of those folks who carry around Magic Markers to correct signs but I do notice and it does bother me.

The blogosphere is full of such mistakes and, for the most part, I just shake my head and move on. I would never correct a stranger -- it's not that big a deal.

But what about when it's someone who's a friend? And a fellow writer? There have been instances of agents or publishers reading the blogs of prospective clients. So if you're an aspiring writer, posting your work in a public place, isn't it to your advantage to have it error-free?

I bring this up because I finally got up my nerve to correct someone I know -- privately, of course. Comments are NOT the place for such. And I think this person is still speaking to me.

One of mistakes I see most often is addressed on the first page of this invaluable reference book,
Here it is:

IT'S means it is, as in "It's a cold day in Hell."

ITS (no apostrophe) is possessive, as in "The dog rolled its eyes."

And, for the most part, plurals don't need apostrophes. As in "They threw the eggs (not egg's) at the busybody, ex-English teacher."

And misspellings! The spell check feature isn't perfect but it's worth using every time before you post, even if you're a pretty good speller. (I just found out I'd misspelled -- or mistyped -- apostrophe. You can imagine how much I don't want to make a mistake in this particular post.)

Enough for today. I won't even mention how people, including newspaper reporters and TV anchors, misuse the verbs lie and lay.

I'll just let sleeping dogs lie.

Signs and Portents

a

For some years now, ever since a friend alerted me to the fact that the Mayan calendar says the end of the world will occur on December 3, 2012, I've kept that date on my desk with the notation 'PLAN AHEAD.' Now, it seems, we have only about two weeks.

Oh dear, oh dear . . .

It's hardly worth bothering even reading the Sun's article '7 SUPERFOODS TO FIGHT EVERY KNOWN DISEASE,' much less taking the trouble to incorporate them into my diet. No, with so little time remaining I'm tempted to recreate a sandwich I had in England a few years ago -- Brie and (English) bacon snuggled into a heavily buttered baguette. Now that's a sandwich.

I'd laugh off this latest apocalyptic warning -- I was laughing it off -- till early this morning, reading The New York Times headlines on the internet, I was shocked (shocked, I say!) to see that this venerable and conservative (grammatically, at least) old lady of a newspaper had used, in a headline, It's as a possessive, when we all know it's is the contraction for It is. By the time I got ready to write this post, the mistake had been corrected but still . .

Could this indeed be the beginning of the end? Signs and portents . . .



And though mail service may be ended and we'll all be too busy to worry about such things by the time I receive my early author's copies, you can still leave a comment to be entered in a drawing to win an early copy of In A Dark Season. The 31st is the last day to enter and I'll announce the winner on April 1.