Grammar Giggle – Mac & Choose

My sister sent me this from a website when she was researching potential food my husband (who is a sensitive celiac) could eat on a recent vacation we took together. She noticed this one offered “3-cheese mac & choose.” They obviously got it correct a few words before this obvious error, but because it is a “real” word, it doesn’t trigger spell check.

Grammar Giggle – Non-Smiling Home

I saw this recently in my Facebook feed. It looks to me like this was a Facebook autocorrect that wasn’t caught. It is really important to actually look at texts, posts, emails, etc. to make sure your electronic device didn’t decide it was smarter than you and change a word to what it thinks you wanted to say, even though what they chose was not even close. Just review it quickly, change anything you need to, and then press that big button to send it off. You will feel better knowing that what you are sending actually says what you want it to say and your friends, family, and others won’t wonder why you’re obviously upset and talking about a non-smiling home.

Grammar Giggle – Is It Really In Emasculate Condition?

A friend who was looking for a new house recently sent this one to me. There are so many problems with this, but I wanted to point out the most egregious. In addition to the random capitalizations, random word separation, words that would pass spell check but are not the right word, and using numbers instead of letters, the correct word for the circled word below should be “immaculate.”

Capitol or Capital?

With all the recent and upcoming activity in our nation’s capital, it’s important that if you’re commenting on it, it is spelled correctly. Here is the breakdown:

According to The Gregg Reference Manual, the word “capital” used as an adjective can mean “chief” or “foremost” or “punishable by death” (as in a capital crime). As a noun, it can mean “a principal sum of money” or can designate between large and lowercase letters (as capital A and lowercase a). Capital also means “the city that serves as the seat of a country’s government” (Washington, D.C. is this nation’s capital).

The word “capitol” refers to the building in which a state legislative body meets and the capitalized word “Capitol” refers to the building in which the United States Congress meets.

Capitol Hill is an imaginative name for the legislative branch of the U.S. government (Congress) and refers to the site of the Capitol.

An easy way to remember it might be that capitOl refers to a building (think of the Capitol building and its circular dOme so the “o” looks like the dome) where legislative bodies meet and you capitalize it where United States Congress meets.

CapitAl means All the other uses of “capital.”

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash