Okay. I've said it before. Those examples in the National Grammar Day site are ill-chosen and churlish. I find them objectionable. Why?

Think about it. When Jay Leno does his headlines, he does it in good humor, and the mistakes amount to double entendres. The National Grammar Day mistake examples were mean spirited or grasping at straws. I understood the headline, and I didn't read it to mean the girl might have killed the survivors of the plane crash. And the legal ad was written by someone who wrote phonetically. He knew what he meant and he wrote under a strain so wasn't at his best. I'd also guess by the context and usage that English isn't his first language. There was nothing in that ad that was funny; a proof-reader could have helped but legal ads have to go exactly as they are submitted.

I made the mistake of criticizing the writing skills of a couple of friends back in my college days. Friends who wrote letters. I was so smart. Guess what? They never wrote back. My loss, my stupidity. It was years later that a professor, one of the smartest guys I know, made the connection I needed to understand all along. We use LANGUAGE to communicate, and both of those examples could be understood by the reader, even if the word choice wasn't good. They sounded like what they meant. Language is to communicate, and GRAMMAR is simply "manners." It is the social convention that says "we prefer to do it this way." Yes, you can use the fancy little fork on the far outside of the huge array of flatware to eat your salad, or you can pick up a knife and pierce the leaves and eat it. One looks boorish and crude, but it gets the job done.

Get it?

So I laugh along with Jay Leno like everyone else, and I catch some blunders of my own. I'm dyslexic, I may come up with more than my share.

Here is a photo, from Salladasburg, PA, the family graveyard.

Which of you is going to step up to these grieving parents and ridicule their "grammar?"

SRS, MA, English, 1999

rant off