I heard about this phrase the other day.
Problem:
The preposition “in” is incorrect.
Explanation:
My friend Nickie F. told me about this phrase.
It seems that someone was telling her about his popularity with his boss.
He said, “Oh well, I guess I’m not the apple in her eye anymore.”
An “apple in one’s eye” is a humorous misstating of the idiom “an apple of one’s eye”, which means a person that one loves very much (FreeDictionary.com).
Good catch, Nickie!
Solution:
“… the apple of her eye …”
This is a bastardization of a phrase.
Problem:
The second “in” is incorrect in this phrase.
Explanation:
The conjunction “and” is often mispronounced by Americans as if it were the preposition “in”.
The correct phrase is “in this day and age” — with the conjunction “and” between the word “day” and the word “age” — because one can write “in this day” or “in this age”.
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:
This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “in this day and age” versus the incorrect “in this day in age” by a ratio of 26.8-to-1, which is very good.
Solution:
“in this day and age”
The problem with this most likely is not obvious, so let me explain.
Problem:
A preposition is missing.
Explanation:
I saw “Documenting Clarify” as the subtitle in a troubleshooting article that I was helping to edit for a company’s customer-service representatives (CSRs).
Clarify is a customer-relationship manager (CRM) program, and the CSRs use Clarify to document how they have helped the company’s customers.
So a CSR will open a “case” in Clarify when a customer calls the company. While the CSR is helping the caller, the CSR makes notes about the problem and resolution within the case.
“Documenting Clarify” in the article that I was editing introduced a section about how the CSR should make notes about the particular problem to which the article pertained.
The grammatical problem, then, with “Documenting Clarify” is that it implies that the readers is documenting the CRM program itself instead of the problem covered by the troubleshooting article.
Solution:
“Documenting in Clarify”