I saw this yesterday on a flower-shop sign.
Problem:
The first noun is misspelled.
Explanation:
The flower-shop sign appeared yesterday in a Channel-11 local news report about the death of Michael DeBakey, M.D., a Houston medical legend.
C-O-N-D-O-L-A-N-C-E-S was on the sign in large, all-capital letters.
This noun is correctly spelled C-O-N-D-O-L-E-N-C-E-S.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “condolences” — 6,320,000 matches
- “condolances” — 91,400 matches
This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 69.1:1, which is not too bad, especially given the fewer than one hundred thousand instances of the misspelling.
Solution:
“OUR CONDOLENCES TO THE DEBAKEY FAMILY”