Adjectives

“Forth-Sixth Grade Curriculum”

Adjectives, Misspellings

My wife saw this title yesterday on a manual from ChildBuilders.

Problems:
1. The first adjective is misspelled.
2. The range is written incorrectly.
3. Everything before “Curriculum” should be hyphenated.

Explanation:
ChildBuilders is an admirable non-profit organization aimed at preventing mental-health problems in children.

So this title on the cover of a printed manual aimed at teachers and school administrators is especially embarrassing.

First, “Forth” (spelled without a “u”) should be “Fourth” (spelled with a “u”) — as in fourth grade.

Second, a range of ordinal numbers should be written with the preposition “to” in the middle — as in first to third or as in seventh to ninth.

Third, when a range is used to modify a noun (for example, “Grade”) that in turn modifies another noun (for example, “Curriculum”), everything before the final noun should be hyphenated.

The solution comes from these three corrections.

Solution:
“Fourth-to-Sixth-Grade Curriculum”

“… as seemless as possible.”

Adjectives, Misspellings

I saw this in an email message from a new supervisor of a department of employees.

Problem:
The word “seemless” is nonsensical.

Explanation:
The supervisor sent a “Good Morning!” email message to the employees in an existing department to which he had just been assigned.

He was trying to tell them that the transition from the previous supervisor to him would be smooth — that effectively it would have no seams.

That gives us the solution.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “seamless” — 33,700,000 matches
  • “seemless” — 771,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “seamless” over “seemless” by a ratio of 43.7:1 — good, but not great, especially given the nearly one million matches for the misspelled word.

Solution:
“… as seamless as possible.”

“Loose” vs. “Lose”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Verbs, Versus

Many people write “loose” when they mean “lose” instead.

Problem:
The verb “lose” does not look like it would be pronounced with the oo sound, so many people mistakenly choose the “oo” word (“loose”) instead.

Explanation:
As I’ve written in an earlier post, it’s true that “loose” can be used as a verb as well as an adjective.

However, when used as a verb, “loose” does not mean “stops having”; this definition belongs to the verb “lose” instead.

If you look up the origins of these two words, you see that:

  • “lose” — pronounced [looz] — is derived from Old English losian;
  • “loose” — pronounced [loos] — is derived from Middle English los, loos.

Knowing the origins of these two words does not help me to remember the correct spelling. In fact, I don’t know how I keep them straight (no mnemonic comes to mind), but I do.

Solution:
Simply memorize that the verb “lose” is spelled with one ‘o’.