Nouns

“… no longer apart of the group”

Adjectives, Adverbs, Idioms, Nouns, Prepositions

My wife saw this the other day in a seminar handout.

Problem:
The word “apart” — spelled A-P-A-R-T with no spaces — does not belong in this phrase.

Explanation:
The word “apart” as an adverb means into parts or pieces, as in “The tornado blew the house apart.”

The word “apart” can be combined with “from” to form a prepositional idiom that means besides or in addition to, as in “She wrote to no one apart from Jim.”

The word “apart” as an adjective means having unique or independent characteristics and is usually used after the noun that it modifies, as in “an institution apart”.

The word “apart” is NOT a noun, but a noun is what the phrase required, given that the writer was referring to someone not being a member of a group.

Solution:
“… no longer a part of the group”

“Readyness to travel”

Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a job announcement from IBM.

Problem:
“Readyness” — with the letter Y in the middle — is a misspelled noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in “ready” must be changed to “i” when the suffix N-E-S-S is appended to a word such as “ready”.

I suppose that the hiring standards or quality control at IBM are suffering.

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

  • “readiness” — with the letter I in the middle — 17,700,000 matches
  • “readyness” — with the letter Y in the middle — 81,800 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 216-to-1, which is excellent.

Solution:
“Readiness to travel”

“OUR CONDOLANCES TO THE DEBAKEY FAMILY”

Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this yesterday on a flower-shop sign.

Problem:
The first noun is misspelled.

Explanation:
The flower-shop sign appeared yesterday in a Channel-11 local news report about the death of Michael DeBakey, M.D., a Houston medical legend.

C-O-N-D-O-L-A-N-C-E-S was on the sign in large, all-capital letters.

This noun is correctly spelled C-O-N-D-O-L-E-N-C-E-S.

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

  • “condolences” — 6,320,000 matches
  • “condolances” — 91,400 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 69.1:1, which is not too bad, especially given the fewer than one hundred thousand instances of the misspelling.

Solution:
“OUR CONDOLENCES TO THE DEBAKEY FAMILY”