I saw this today in a Vonage commercial.
Problem:
The adverb does not match the tense of the verb.
Explanation:
The adverb “yet” means at the present time.
The expression “didn’t leave” is in the past tense, so “yet” does not go with “didn’t leave” (or any other expression in the past tense).
In other words, it makes no sense to say, “Hope you didn’t leave at the present time.”
To fix this, one must change the expression to the present tense.
Solution:
“Hope you have not left yet.”
I saw this yesterday on an invoice.
Problems:
1. The verb is misspelled.
2. The number could have been expressed in a word.
3. The word following “of” is misspelled.
Explanation:
The invoice related to some landscape work that we had contracted for our home.
Granted, landscapers do not have to be good spellers, especially if they are good landscapers.
But bad spelling does not help one’s image with consumers.
The first problem was that the landscaper thought that the preterite of the verb “lay” should be spelled L-A-Y-E-D.
That is a good guess by a kindergartner, but it is a bit embarrassing to come from a forty-something-year-old adult.
Some might say that the second problem is not truly a problem, especially when it comes to invoices and accounting.
I would counter-argue that it is helpful to follow the general rule for a small number — that it should be written as a word, perhaps followed by the number in parentheses.
The third problem — the misspelling of the word after the preposition “of” — was severe enough that it confused my wife.
She told me that she kept wondering what was meant by S-A-W-D. After I pronounced this made-up word, it became clear what the landscaper was trying to say.
Solution:
“laid three (3) pallets of sod”
I heard this expression last evening on a Travel Channel television program.
Problems:
1. The verbs are incorrect.
2. A preposition is missing.
Explanation:
The TV program was reviewing night life in Las Vegas.
One of the featured locations was a night club in which performers sit and stand on swings hung from the ceiling.
The narrator claimed that an exciting feature was that the club had “swings that raise and lower from the ceiling”.
The first problem is that the verbs “raise” and “lower” are transitive verbs — that is, verbs that require both a direct subject and one or more objects — whereas intransitive verbs — that is, verbs that do not take an object — are required here.
Examples of transitive verbs include “cut” and “hit” and “put”.
Examples of intransitive verbs include “die” and “rot” and “sit”.
“Swings that raise and lower from the ceiling” requires intransitive verbs, and “rise” and “fall” are the appropriate corrections to “raise” and “lower”, respectively.
These corrections give us “swings that rise and fall from the ceiling”.
I believe that this use of “raise” and “lower” as intransitive verbs is connected to the use of “lay” as an intransitive verb — as in “Please lay down now!” — through a popular but incorrect assumption that transitive verbs are interchangeable with intransitive verbs.
The second problem is a lack of parallelism. It makes no sense to say “rise from the ceiling”, so the first and second verbs may not share the preposition “from”.
Instead, the verb “rise” requires its own preposition in relation to “the ceiling”. That required preposition is “to”.
I believe that the omission of “to” after the first verb is related to the common English blunder of omitting all prepositions but the final one in a list of verbs in a sentence. My impression is that this blunder comes from speakers and writers not thinking ahead, perhaps because they were not taught about the importance of parallelism in sentences.
Solution:
“swings that rise to and fall from the ceiling”