Common English Blunders

“Drywall Finisher’s”

Apostrophes, Common English Blunders, Nouns, Possessives

I saw this a week ago on a pickup truck.

Problem:
A possessive apostrophe appeared where it should not.

Explanation:
“Drywall Finisher’s” — with an apostrophe before the letter “s” — was the title on a magnetic sign attached to the side of a pickup truck that I saw last week.

The contractor’s telephone number and some other information appeared beneath the title.

Because the APOSTROPHE-S made the word “Finisher” a possessive, I had to wonder what was being possessed.

But I was left hanging.

The apostrophe in “Finisher’s” should not have been there.

The sign maker was trying to pluralize the noun “Finisher”.

He or she instead made the sign maker’s common blunder of inserting a possessive apostrophe when pluralizing a noun.

Maybe sign makers just love to create apostrophes?

Solution:
“Drywall Finishers”

More about “Nauseous” vs. “Nauseated”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Versus

I wrote a blog post in November 2007 about “Nauseous” vs. “Nauseated”.

I recently heard an actress on a TV drama say that she felt nauseous when she should have said that she felt nauseated.

She made me think again about the two words.

And I realized something: Saying “nauseous” when one should say “nauseated” instead is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

Many Americans say “nauseous” as if it had only two syllables, as in NAW-SHUHS, instead of pronouncing all three syllables, as in NAW-ZEE-UHS.

Either way, it is simpler to say the two- or three-syllable “nauseous” than it is to say the four-syllable “nauseated”.

“We need to error on the safe side.”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Nouns, Verbs

I overheard a conference call in which someone said this a few days ago.

Problem:
The speaker used the wrong word for the verb after “We need to” in this statement.

Explanation:
The speaker who said “We need to error on the safe side.” was discussing a company policy with others on the conference call.

The word “error” is a noun and not a verb.

What the speaker should have used is the word “err”, which looks like “error” but is a verb that means to be mistaken or incorrect.

Perhaps the speaker simply mispronounced “err” (the verb) as “error” (the noun).

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:

  • “err on the safe side” — 23,600 matches
  • “error on the safe side” — 1,260 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used “err on the safe side” versus “error on the safe side” by a ratio of 18.7-to-1, which is good by not great.

Solution:
“We need to err on the side of caution.”