“… inspections that were never finalled …”

Adjectives, Nouns, Verbs

I saw this yesterday in a letter.

Problem:
The word “final” is not a verb.

Explanation:
The letter came from the City of Houston Code Enforcement Division.

The full sentence was “Also, you may have outstanding inspections that were never finalled on this project as listed below.”

The problem with this sentence is that “final” is a noun or an adjective, but never a verb.

So one cannot “final a project”, and therefore one cannot use “final” as a verb in passive voice, either.

It is ironic that the next sentence in the letter contained the correct verb.

For fun, I searched Google for “finalled” (with the quotation marks, to avoid matches for such phrases as “final LED”) and got about 6,230 matches.

This indicates that very people are making the mistake made by in the form letter from the City of Houston Code Enforcement Division.

Solution:
“… inspections that were never finalized …”