Grammar Giggle – Who Is Staying In Jail?

I saw this one on Twitter. Everything is spelled correctly, nothing would trigger spell check, and free Grammarly didn’t catch it, but this headline is really unclear about exactly who will remain in jail. I mean, obviously, the judge is not in jail and Mr. Epstein is, so we can assume they are talking about Mr. Epstein, but that’s not really what it says. Read literally, the judge denied bail and will remain in jail pending trial.

Grammar Giggle – Happy Independence Day!

I received this email this week from a local restaurant. Email subjects are just as important as the email itself. It’s obvious they know HOW to spell “independence,” but it’s also obvious they didn’t check it before hitting send.

Grammar Giggle – An Antique Store and Errors

I saw this sign recently. Not only was this antique store advertised with the restaurant we were going to and then it was permanently closed, but the sign indicating that had lots of trouble. I know this person probably has a cell phone. I know dictionary.com is free. I know this person should have tried to spell everything correctly.

Grammar Giggle – Impregnated her Pregnant

Another example of news agencies trying to get stories out quickly and not paying attention to what they say. This was a recent local news station news flash. To be clear, according to Merriam Webster, “impregnant” means to make pregnant. So the sentence did not need the word “pregnant” since it is obviously duplication.

Grammar Giggle – Proceeding

I was working on this document recently creating a template for responses to requests for production for one of our attorneys. This is from the original requests. This is another example of an error that spellcheck will not catch because while it IS a legitimate and correctly-spelled word, it is not the CORRECT word. “Proceed” means to advance, as in proceeding in a certain direction, and “precede” means to go before, as in the years preceding 2012. And what is with the random ending bracket? I read it over several times and did not find an opening bracket. I will have to give them this–at least their cut and paste skills were on point because this same error was in every matching paragraph for each request.

Grammar Giggle – During And Robbery

I have a new source of Grammar Giggles: a local news station “breaking news” updates. I don’t read them all, but it seems that every time I actually read one, I find something wrong. This example would pass spell check, but should not pass eye and brain check. And the full name of both Baseline and Power are “Roads,” so that should be capitalized.