I'VE JUST GOTTA DO IT!

I get wonderful emails all the time from people saying, love the site, great content -- but for God's sake, you have a PhD, can't you learn how to spell/learn the difference between it's and its/insert your favorite grammar rule here? Well, the sad truth is, no, I can't spell. And I try as hard as I can to catch every grammatical error, but blogging, unlike academic writing, is done sans editor or copy editor or proof reader. It's just me and a key board and a cup of coffee. (OK, and a cigarette.) But you all have to admit, I have gotten lots better with "its" and "it's" since I've started . . . And I do appreciate all of you overlooking the mistakes I don't catch.

But I just couldn't help linking to this article from today's Times. See? It's not that I don't know grammar. It's that my writing is avant garde!

Comments

[Ron Hardin]

A friend used to tell people that genitive ``its'' has no apostrophe, just as ``his'' has no apostrophe.

Don't think of ``hers'' because I've seen people put an apostrophe in, and you may start wondering about that too.

[Gordon Daugherty]

Don't feel too bad; I don't know your background but you may simply be typical of someone educated in the USA the past 20-25 years. After all, even PhD's were just schoolkids once.

Up the freeway here is a nice townhome complex. Outside are two large banners, one high on the building, saying, "CONDO'S FOR SALE." So my wife gave them a call about the punctuation.

"Oh, yes," said the sweet voice that answered, "we've gotten several calls. That's a contraction that means 'condominiums for sale.' "

Wife replied that, if they intend to insult folks' intelligence that way, they should just say it means "CONDO IS FOR SALE."

[dauber]

I come by it honestly -- I am, in fact, a proud product of the New York City public school system! In fact I only learned "its" and "it's" when the blog went up and a friend of mine who is grammar obsessed (she would have called those condo owners in a heart beat) was emailing me corrections almost every day -- she finally realized she was correcting me so often because I didn't know the rules and was therefore just bluffing . . .

The spelling, however, I can't put on the school system. I think my brain just isn't hard wired right for that somehow. . .

[John Kerry]

When I was in Viet Nam, I taught my men – my band of brothers – the proper use of the apostrophe. We soon move on to the correct usage of diacritical marks in French and umlauts in German.

If only I’d had more than four months, I could have done wonders.

And I’d wager that my grammar can beat up your grammar any day of the week - just ask grampar.

[Ron Hardin]

You can fix spelling by taking several years off to read some really difficult and interesting author, and copying out every sentence into a notebook as a speed control. Magically, you'll learn all the words that you run into, even though spelling is not the point.

A few words remain uncertain, like correspondent and impedance, but they don't show up much.

I recommend Derrida.