The flyer for a recent fundraising event for one of my grandsons caught my eye, so I checked out the website. All I can say is that they were consistent–it was wrong, but it was wrong in both places. The correct word is “whose.” The word “who’s” is a contraction for “who is” which would not be correct in the sentence.
Do you really think typographical errors don’t matter much? I read an article recently from The Washington Post about a typo that thwarted a $1 billion cyber heist on a Bangladesh bank. It seems that the hackers broke into the Bangladesh central bank’s system in February and stole the credentials necessary to authorize payment transfers. They used the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (“FRBNY”) to make nearly three dozen hefty money transfers from the Bangladesh bank’s account with the FRBNY to other overseas financial institutions.
The hackers were able to make four transfers to accounts in the Philippines totaling about $80 million. The fifth request for a transfer of $20 million to an apparently fictitious Sri Lankan nonprofit group was flagged by the routing bank as suspicious because the transfer request said “fandation” rather than “foundation.” When the routing bank asked for confirmation, the Bangladesh bank was able to stop the transaction. The other requests waiting to be processed—totaling $850 million to $870 million—were also stopped.
While it appears there is some finger-pointing going on about who is at fault and threats of international lawsuits, it was a knowledgeable person with obviously good proofreading skills who was paying attention who actually halted a potential $1 billion crime. Proofreading matters!
I was behind this car recently and the magnet caught my eye. With apologies for the dirty windshield (and I was stopped when I took the picture), here we go. When you are the previous generation, you are the “grand.” This holds true for grandson, granddaughter, grandchild, and granddog. The Urban Dictionary defines a GRANDDOG as:
The adorable puppy your son or daughter just adopted in lieu of a human baby… in other words, as close to grandkids as you’re going to get for now.
Check out this adorable sweater I got for my granddog! I’m taking it to him when I visit my son next month.
Thus, the “grandogs” in my picture are apparently “ogs” that this person’s child owns because if it were “dogs,” the magnet would say “I love my granddogs.”
This was on a letter that we received in our office recently. For some reason, people don’t feel the need to proof inside addresses, signature blocks, and pleading party and service information. That information is important, particularly when you misspell your own title in what should be some kind of macro or automatic fill so that it looks the same every time. The same is even more true for email, since that is what we use most. Go and check your signature block right now to make sure it is correct and if you had to change something, let me know.
March 4 is one of my very favorite holidays. It is National Grammar Day! What could be better than that? Although this picture is absolutely correct. In my world, every day IS National Grammar Day.
According to Wikipedia, the holiday was started in 2008 by Martha Brockenbrough, the author of “Things That Make Us [Sic]” (2008) and founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. In honor of this holiday just made for Proof That proofreading blog, I’ve added a little something I found on the Internet. So go crazy with your Facebook posts and emails and I’ll try not to judge–today. Tomorrow I will be back on the search for good Grammar Giggles!
This one I found on Twitter and thought it was appropriate for the season. Again, spell check would not have caught this one.
Friends who were researching hotels for an event sent this to me recently.
Every business should have someone proof their website. These kinds of errors just make the business look like they don’t care quite enough.
I keep thinking that if I ever want to change my line of work, all of my local news stations could sure use someone to type their screen verbiage. A friend sent me this one and I only saw the errant apostrophe until I was working with the picture here and saw the hot mess of an attempt at the second use of the word “closing.” The apostrophe in “it’s” is only used as a contraction of “it is” and not to signify possession by “it” of anything– that would simply be “its” as in “closing its doors.” And you spelled “closing” correctly once, what the heck happened to the second one? In this case, two strikes and you’re out!
Happy Valentine’s Day to all the Proof That proofreading blog readers! May your day be spent with those you love and with good grammar. You’re awesome!
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