Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Of this he is correct

Been on vacation. Sorry for the wait.

Any wordies out there who haven't read William Safire's "On Language" column? It runs every Sunday in The New York Times Magazine. I enjoyed Sunday's piece on the word "of." I especially liked the last section, in which the columnist reminds us that "could've" is short for "could have," not "could of." I see the latter all the time in student work. Spell checker won't catch that mistake, people.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've seen that one. What about using "your" instead of "you're" when the writer is trying to shorten "you are"? I saw that recently.

Did you see the article a while back in the Sunday NYT about Creationist geologists? It was hilarious and a little scary.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25wwln-geologists-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=geology+and+creationism&oref=slogin

Lynn Klyde-Silverstein said...

Reader1 -- I did see that article. It's hard to believe.