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– One of my pet peeves recently has been a rise in the number of ostensibly native English speakers who have no clue how to use apostrophes. I have seen apostrophe misuse, abuse, and ignorance in all income and cultural settings. For instance, the graphic displayed in this posting by the Rhode Island branch of the right-wing anti-equality group NOM (hat tip to Laurel Ramseyer) incorporates text reading as follows: “Your religious?! Your opinion has no equality here!” For future reference to RI-NOM: The first word should read “You’re”, which is a contraction of the two words “You are”. Usage demonstration: “You’re very into making non-sequitur-based bullshit assertions, aren’t you?”
– Last August 4, President Obama was photographed in the act of skeet shooting. Those GOP base members whose, ah, idiosyncrasies are the result of nearly five decades of nurturing via the Southern Strategy have responded pretty much as you would suspect to this: By claiming without evidence that the photo was faked.
– Another Republican horndog caught abusing the public trust. This time, it’s Nebraska’s (now former) lieutenant governor, Rick Sheehy. Maybe he and David Petraeus can form a support group.
– The National Weather Service fired Bill Proenza, one of its top managers, in an act that to me and many others stinks to high heaven of retaliation. He’d dared to tell the Washington Post a few days ago that the NWS was already hurting because of the cut-here-cut-now-don’t-tax-the-rich mentality gripping Capitol Hill, and that the cuts mandated by sequestration would worsen an already-bad situation to the point where severe storms could escape the Service’s notice until it was too late.
40 Comments
“Methinks” “there” “is” “more” “to” “this” “story” “than” “told”!
Half his staff? Hmm….my BS detector is going “off”. Perhaps “one of its top managers” does not mean “one of its best managers”.
Of course we all know that republicans…eat, shoots, and leaves. :-)
twolf’s been causing mischief again
I still think the best way to get gun control is for the Black Panthers to re-emerge, say in Chicago, to police their own neighborhoods with methods other than stop-and-harass. When the Black Panthers were active in the early 1970s, the NRA was all gun controlsy.
So the righties must think it has to be a fake photo because if it’s a real photo they have more than drones to worry about.
I notice that the White House did not publish the skeet shooting scores. Did by any chance the President go skeet shooting with the duck-hunting John Kerry?
I see “it’s” where “its” should be used quite often. The easiest way to figure that one out (at least for my tiny little pea brain) is by substituting “it is” where the word is supposed to go. One should be able to tell whether the word is correct without even breathing hard.
One would think the wingnuts would accept at face value a photo of the Prez firing a shotgun because (duh) “Black man with a gun, duh.” “The Kenyan Muslin is prolly knockin’ over a liquor store to get hisself another case of malt liquor…because Socialism…”
WaPo has fallen a long way from the heady days of taking down Nixon.
It’s clearly faked. Obama is just blowing smoke, not shooting — there’s no blood.
It has been some time since any of our resident Grammer and Punctuation Scolds have cluck clucked on this existential topic.
Liberals must be superior, i’ll bet Obama has never made an error on any of his death decrees.
When was the last time a wingnut backed up a claim with evidence? Real evidence, that is–not Bible verses and magical thinking.
No personal attacks are allowed on Firedoglake. -MyFDL Editor
Sometimes I wonder whether kids are taught in school to insert an apostrophe in a word to warn the reader that an “s” is coming. In the Detroit area it’s very common to see hand-made signs like this:
APPLE’S $1.49/lb.
No personal attacks are allowed on Firedoglake. -MyFDL Editor
Are you saying that Kelsey Grammer has a tendency to scold people?
“I demand an end to the apostrophe: Then the maligned greengrocer will be as literate as you and I,”–Matthew Engel
Went to see Django Unchained in mostly lilly White Wasilla with a longtime Black friend of mine. He laughed at different jokes than most of the White people. Sort of like going to Little Big Man with a Native American.
Anyway, we were both eyed a lot as we left, sort of being checked out to see if we were packing.
I love apostrophes. And I hate to see them misused. One of the signs that really bugs me when I pass it says in very large red letters across the side of the building: U JOINT’S
These people are nuts. Or maybe I should say they’re brainwashed.
I heard a group of people in Columbus on election night say, as they listened to Obama speak after he won re-election:
“Listen to him! He don’t even speak English!”
Oh–kay…..
my favorite apostrophe use in english: fo’c's’le. but as an internet writer of olde, i mostly just skip em. i talk to much as it is.
I often find that I am laughing out loud in the movies, by myself. I think of it as my quirky sense of humor, but just as likely, it’s just inappropriate. Oh well.
You know, I’ve noticed that wingnut trolls (well, and on their own sites as well) tend to Capitalize Words that Shouldn’t Be Capitalized. Especially nouns. As if English were German, or something.
Just saying.
My trick for its vs it’s was always to recall that it is the same as his or hers or theirs, none of which needs an apostrophe. Of course, I once saw “her’s” so that wouldn’t help that person.
But the peeve that’s overtaken the apostrophe abuse is using the wrong pronoun as the object of a verb or a preposition, and it’s getting worse. You know, “I told my son and she not to come over.”
They went to the movies with Mary and he.
Aaargh! And the president, who speaks quite good English(!!!) does it sometimes, too. Drives me crazy.
My theory is that these people were scared by a copy of the Declaration of Independence at a very young age. That, or they have degrees from matchbook-cover law schools.
Yes me too. I guess “My wife and myself” sounds genteel or something, but it’s dead wrong. “My wife and I went to…” etc. is perfectly fine.
Likely not since The Flood. Come to think of it, not even then.
Were you?
Well, yes, that’s bad, but not as bad as the object thing, where they act like “me” “her” “him” and “them” should be avoided at all costs.
I blame over emphasizing not to say “him and me went to school together.” So now people think any time you have two pronouns together, they must be nominative.
So now it’s “there’s a message from she and John” as if a message from “her and John” was a terrible error.
And it’s spreading, as people hear it everywhere, including speech role models like newscasters.
My huge annoyance is ‘that’ (should be used for a thing) when it should be ‘who’ (properly used for a person), as in: 1.) the trooper that shot, 2.) the demonstrators that were arrested 3.) the prisoner that was reported dead ….
PEOPLE!!! Irrespective of the story, *people* are WHO!!!!!
not to mention animals…
Oddly, I don’t mind “that” so much, but “which” used for a human really, really bugs me, and that’s very common in this part of the country (Texas, OK).
What an excellent suggestion!
Republicans claiming something about a Democrat without evidence?
Who could possibly have predicted something as unprecedented as that?
From the looks of it, I would say that the photo was very likely posed, though, which is a very different thing from saying it was faked.
It may well be that the photo was taken while the President was out shooting skeet, but it does look posed.
I can relate to your analogy. In the 1970s, I had the privilege of watching A Man Called Horse with a Dakota community, one of whom was an extra in the movie. They had fun with it. Lots of fun.
I left that little bait in just to see if there would be a patronizing response, you win the prize.
OK, Ms B, happy, delighted, to go to the movies with you if you are OK with it. But I will totally bring my ear protectors.
My fave is “I” following a preposition, as in “That was offensive to tejanarusa and I.” And this version is even worse: “That was a surprise to her and I.”
I strongly second the peeve about use of “that” in place of “who” or “whom,” although special dispensation must be granted Stephen Sondheim (“But worse ‘n that / A person that / Titillates a person and then leaves her flat / Is crazy, / He’s a troubled person, / He’s a truly crazy person himself.”)
My big shoot-me-now is use of “mediums” except in reference to people who conduct seances or shirts with a label reading “M.” Data may be fungible, and I’ve made peace with toggling between “data is” and “data are,” depending on context. But we still live in a world with more than one medium, and their plural is “media.” Special blessings in this regard to my media-activist friends at FAIR. If you listen to their weekly show Counterspin, you’ll note their assiduous preservation of “media are.”
Not sure what guns in particular have to do with the Southern Strategy?
Over at Kos someone needs to tell them Lincoln also shot skeet. Featured articles are favorably comparing O to the great emancipator…. Be sure to add your review of skeet rifles and drones on Amazon!
The description of Republicans having sex, correct?
Or there abouts…
Very few on this continent speak English.
Most speak ‘merican, which is some dialect of English, and its regional variants, where gerunds are part of everyday speech, and perfectly good verbs ignored for their “-ized” gerund forms, and the speech issues from the nasal passages not from the mouth.
To wit: To Burgle, as in “My house was burgled”, instead of “My home was burglarized”.
Punctuation is applied to the wrong side of the inverted commas.
I do not have a “cute accent”. Everybody else has an accent, I do not.
I do not have a “cute accent”. Everybody else has an accent, I do not.
Horsefeathers! /s
What I detest is over-use of quotes for emphasis, i.e., “scare” quotes. We have formatting tools in the comment window, no need to put quote marks around words to emphasize them.
/grump