Author: Kirk

“Power Washing: Commerical and Res.”

Adjectives

I saw this on a hand-written “bandit” sign this morning.

Problem:
The misspelling is quite obvious, I hope!

Explanation:
A “bandit” sign is what the City of Houston calls any sign placed illegally in a public right-of-way, such as at a street corner.

The misspelling of the word “commercial” — as C-O-M-M-E-R-I-C-A-L — on a sign that read “Power Washing Commerical and Res.” was very obvious.

The sign was one of many hand-written signs that I had seen around Houston in the past week for the same power-washing company, which apparently offers its services to both residential and commercial customers.

What gave me pause, though, was that this was not a typographic error.

Granted, people can easily misspell words when hand-writing them, too.

But this particular error (Would you call it a “hand-o” instead of a “typo”?) caught my eye because it immediately looked wrong.

This makes me wonder whether the sign writer was simply guessing at the proper order of the letters, knowing that there were both an “i” and a “c” in the middle of the adjective “Commercial”.

Such will be the fate of anyone who is not taught phonetics, in my opinion.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “commercial” — 672,000,000 matches
  • “commerical” — 5,450,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 123-to-1, which is excellent, although my enthusiasm is dampened by the nearly 5.5 million misspellings.

Solution:
“Power Washing: Commercial and Res.”

“a student of mine’s mother”

Apostrophes, Possessives, Pronouns

I heard this the other day, and it struck me as odd — mostly because there is a bad habit among many American children to say “mines” instead of “mine”.

Problem:
A pronoun may not be converted into a possessive simply by adding apostrophe-“s”.

Explanation:
The archaic use of the word “mine” as a pronoun is as a substitute for “my” — as in “Mine eyes have seen the glory …”.

But the word “mine” as a pronoun has two modern meanings:

  1. a predicate-adjective form of the possessive case of the pronoun “I”, as in “The green car is mine.”;
  2. something belonging to me, as in “Mine is the purple towel.”

I am unsure whether the “mine” in “a student of mine’s mother” more closely follows definition #1 or definition #2.

Concentrating on the first part of the phrase, one could argue that the “mine” in “a student of mine” follows definition #1 because one could say, “The student is mine.”

Or one could argue that the “mine” in “a student of mine” follows definition #2 because one could say, “Mine is the student.”

No matter which argument makes more sense to you, it is clear that “mine” in “a student of mine’s mother” is a pronoun.

And a pronoun may not be converted into a possessive simply by adding apostrophe-“s”, so the phrase must be rewritten.

Solution:
“the mother of one of my students”
OR
“one of my students’ mothers”

“Documenting Clarify”

Prepositions

The problem with this most likely is not obvious, so let me explain.

Problem:
A preposition is missing.

Explanation:
I saw “Documenting Clarify” as the subtitle in a troubleshooting article that I was helping to edit for a company’s customer-service representatives (CSRs).

Clarify is a customer-relationship manager (CRM) program, and the CSRs use Clarify to document how they have helped the company’s customers.

So a CSR will open a “case” in Clarify when a customer calls the company. While the CSR is helping the caller, the CSR makes notes about the problem and resolution within the case.

“Documenting Clarify” in the article that I was editing introduced a section about how the CSR should make notes about the particular problem to which the article pertained.

The grammatical problem, then, with “Documenting Clarify” is that it implies that the readers is documenting the CRM program itself instead of the problem covered by the troubleshooting article.

Solution:
“Documenting in Clarify”