Misspellings

“Masonary”

Misspellings

I saw this yesterday at a website for a company named Bullion Coatings.

Problem:
“Masonary” — with two instances of the letter A — is a misspelling.

Explanation:
The website referred to “Masonary Effects”.

The intent of this phrase was to say that the company could apply an acrylic coating to concrete to create stonework-like effects, which gives us the solution — “masonry” — without the second instance of the letter A.

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

  • “masonry” — 18,000,000 matches
  • “masonary” — 420,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 42.9:1, which is good, but the fact that the Web contains almost 500 thousand instances of “masonary” is bit disappointing.

Solution:
“Masonry”

Using Google to Examine English Usage

Common English Blunders, Misspellings

Google, or any other search engine for the Web, can be a tool for examining English usage on the Web.

For example, one can use Google to get the number of Web pages containing a correctly spelled word vs. the number of Web pages containing one or more misspelled forms of that word.

One can also look for bad grammar, bad punctuation, and so on.

Several of my blog posts have included my results of these kinds of searches at Google.

To find these blog posts, simply go to the blog archives, enter “Google” (without the quotation marks) in the search box, and click the [Search] button.

However, don’t expect these Google-based comparisons of correct versus incorrect usage to remain static. As usage changes, so will the Google results.

“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”