Misspellings

“Childrens Protective Service”

Adjectives, Apostrophes, Devolution toward Simpler, Misspellings, Possessives

I saw this yesterday in an email message.

Problem:
An apostrophe is missing.

Explanations:
The email message was talking about social-work efforts, and “Childrens Protective Service” — with “Childrens” spelled C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N — was the title of one of the sections in the message.

I believe that the absence of a required possessive apostrophe in “Childrens” can be attributable to:

  • A typographical error;
  • Ignorance about possessive apostrophes.

Given how often I see the apostrophe-free “Mens” and “Womens” in department stores, I doubt that “A typographical error” applies to this situation.

That leaves us with “Ignorance about possessive apostrophes”.

I believe that this ignorance is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis.

It is simpler to write possessive words without apostrophes than to write them with apostrophes.

Solution:
“Children’s Protective Service”

“layed 3 pallets of sawd”

Misspellings, Nouns, Verbs

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”

“shuddered windows”

Adjectives, Mispronunciations, Misspellings

I occasionally see or hear this phrase.

Problem:
The word “shuddered” is incorrect here.

Explanation:
I see or hear the phrase as part of a full sentence such as “The shuddered windows protected the glass from the hurricane.”

The intransitive verb “shudder” — with two “d”s and from which the word “shuddered” is derived — means to tremble or shake convulsively, as from cold, fear, or horror.

So the past participle “shuddered” cannot be used as an adjective to modify “windows” for two reasons:

  1. The verb “shudder” is intransitive and therefore its past participle cannot be used as an adjective.
  2. Even if “shuddered” could be used as an adjective, it would make no sense to use it to modify the noun “windows”.

The solution comes from realizing that Americans often mispronounce “t”s (as in “tango”) as “d”s (as in “David”).

So the word “shudder” — with two “d”s — is a typical mispronunciation, at least by Americans, of the word “shutter” — with two “t”s.

And given that the transitive verb “shutter” means to close with shutters, we have the solution.

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:

  • “shuttered windows” — with two middle “t”s as in “tango” — 98,800 matches
  • “shuddered windows” — with two middle “d”s as in “David” — 97,400 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the meaningful “shuttered windows” versus the meaningless “shuddered windows” by a ratio of 1.01-to-1, which is absolutely dreadful.

Solution:
“shuttered windows”