1. There are a significant number of people out there surfing the interwebs on a device they think is called a labtop. Yes, a labtop.

2. Bonified is a word. But it probably doesn’t mean what you think it does.

3. A newt was once an ewt and an apron was once an naperon. It’s because “an” was once the article used with all single nouns. And then things got a little strange …

4. As Ivy Wigmore discovered, there’s a word for the practice of referring to yourself by name.

5. We also found that there’s a word for referring to yourself as if you were a plurality.

6. Threshold has one H but withhold (which I discovered I’d been misspelling forever) has two.

7.  It’s OK to say healthy foods rather than healthful foods.

8. The word factoid can mean either something that’s trivial but true or something that a writer made up and presented as a fact.

9. I would have guessed that the word wow originated, at the earliest, in the 1920s but it’s much, much older than that.

10. A lot of people seem to think they’re devote Christians.

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Have you come across any big grammar or spelling surprises? I’d love to hear about it.  Let me know in the comments or tweet me @tao_of_grammar.

Answer: a

Explanation: 

Wouldn’t have is used in conditional sentences, which state conditions. Facebook wouldn’t have decided to use only HTML5 for mobile development IF they’d known how it would work out.

That construction is known as third conditional, for talking about something that didn’t happen that would have made a difference to the current situation. Here are some examples, from Spotlight-Online:

The third conditional or conditional 3 is formed like this:

if + past perfect ,                        would have + past participle

• “What would you have done if it had happened to you?”
• “If I had known you were coming, I would have combed my hair.”
• “I would have invited you to dinner if you‘d called me back.”

* Remember not to put the would have in the if-clause:
• “I would have told you if I would have known the answer.”

It’s not necessary to explicitly say how things would be different:

 
Incorrect: I wish I wouldn’t have sold the farm to buy Facebook stock.
Correct: I wish I hadn’t sold the farm to buy Facebook stock.

Here’s the correct way to use wouldn’t have in a third conditional sentence:

I wouldn’t have sold the farm to buy Facebook stock if I’d known how overpriced it was.
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a. not that big a deal
b. not that big of a deal

Answer: a.

Explanation:
“Not that big of a deal” is non-standard grammar. However, it’s increasingly common, especially in the U.S.

This seems like a good one to Google for a snapshot of use. Let’s see …

Not that big a deal: 9,610,000
Not that big of a deal: 21,100,000

Wow. Over twice as many instances of the wrong phrase … and you know what that means: “Not that big of a deal” is going to become standard. Language changes and rules change to follow. There’s nothing we can do to change that, so there’s no point in making too big a deal of it.

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Which is correct?
a. As a quick and easy way to share content, I recommend Dropbox.
b. I recommend Dropbox as a quick and easy way to share content.

Answer: b.

Explanation:

What’s wrong with the first sentence? Why, it’s our old friend, the misplaced modifier. Structurally, “as a quick and easy way to share content” modifies the noun or pronoun that immediately follows it. So that means that I am a quick and easy way to share content — and I am not.

Here’s another example, from Strunk and White:

“Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap.”

Although I may be in a somewhat dilapidated condition, that sentence would only be correct if the sellers took pity on me because of my sad state and gave me a steep discount. It’s more likely that “dilapidated condition” is intended to describe the house.

I like this one from the Bangor Daily News, 20 Jan 1978, too:

“After years of being lost under a pile of dust, Walter P. Stanley, III, left, found all the old records of the Bangor Lions Club.”

Good man, Walter P. Stanley, III! Most people would have given up after even a few months lost under a pile of dust.

On Copyblogger, Brian Clark shares two vivid examples from Tom Sant’s book Persuasive Business Proposals:

“After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges.”
Uhh… keep your decomposing brother away from me!

“Featuring plug-in circuit boards, we can strongly endorse this server’s flexibility and growth potential.”
Hmmm… robotic copy written by people embedded with circuit boards. Makes sense.

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Which is correct?
The bring your own device (BYOD) policy is popular with employees but it really puts a strain on __ help desk jockeys.
a. us
b. we

Answer: a.

Explanation:

Let’s simplify that sentence and take another look: You wouldn’t say “The BYOD policy puts a strain on we,” right? So “us” is the correct answer.

For practice, let’s explore the chicken context: You’d say “There’s nobody here but us,” rather than “There’s nobody here but we” so “There’s nobody here but us chickens” is correct. Of course, if help desk workers or chickens are the subject, that changes things. You’d say “We help desk jockeys are not thrilled with the BYOD policy,” for example, and “We chickens would welcome a little company.”

“We” often appears in that type of construction because people who don’t have a firm grasp of pronoun use often think that the subjective pronoun ( I, she, he, they, we or whom) is more proper. The problem doesn’t tend to come up in simple sentences, like “He gave me a lecture on mobile security” but when sentences get even slightly complicated, such people tend to default to subjective pronouns. That’s called overcorrection, kids, and it’s just as wrong as any other type of error.

Here’s a quick reference on pronoun cases:

Victoria Rose offers further discussion of pronoun cases and chickens.

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Answer: b. or c.

Explanation:
If you want to emphasize the word excellent, you want to do just about anything but put it in quotation marks. Really. The use of italics is standard but you can underline, bold, use a different color — do what it takes, if you feel a word needs a little extra oomph. Just don’t do what many small-business people do — put the words they want to shout in quotation marks.

It’s quite ironic: People often use quotation marks to add emphasis to certain words but they’re actually subverting their intended meaning. Quotation marks around words can instruct the reader to think the words mean something other than what they say. It’s like adding a wink to your statement, so people know you’re kidding. If your message is that your iPhone sale is excellent, you don’t want to write that it’s “excellent.”

Want more information? The Yahoo! Style Guide provides an excellent (no quotes!) entry about when to use — and when not to use — quotation marks.

Amused by grammar gaffes? The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is always good for a giggle.

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Explanation:
This post is a response to a cry for help arriving in my email.

Subject line: This bugs me!

Message: I was just reading a gardening blog and came across this: “Try and remove as much of the plant as possible, as some will grow back from remaining roots.” Shouldn’t this read “try to” rather than “try and”? I see and hear this frequently! ARGH!

You’re right, Joan Diamond — and this post is for you! It should, of course, say “try to.” I don’t think anyone ever says “attempt and” but they surely substitute “and” for “to” in other phrases like “be sure and” instead of “be sure to.”

I think it’s time to poll the musicians again, check their grammar:

Rock and Roll Grammar Test
The Eagles failed on the Hotel California album with their song “Try and Love Again.” Donovan scored a grammar fail, too, when he wrote “Ah but I may as well try and catch the wind.”

Coldplay was both poignant AND grammatically correct, singing “I will try to fix you.” But… Drumroll please! Heart gets the gold for the way they pounded the grammar into our heads with their lyric, “Try to understand. Try to understand. Try, try, try to understand… he’s a magic man, Mama.”

As demonstrated by Google suggestions, a lot of people apparently search for the lyrics to “try and remember” unaware that the actual title is “Try to Remember.” (It was written about 50 years ago, when grammar was more popular.) When I tried “try to,” Google suggestions that popped up included “try to remember lyrics” and “try to remember forget lyrics.” Which I understand, I guess. Let’s try to remember to forget the “try and remember” lyrics.

Full disclosure: Joan Diamond is my sister, and she and I have probably sung most of these lyrics loudly and repeatedly, with a total disregard for the grammatical issues. Nevertheless, I suspect we sang the Heart lyrics with particular enthusiasm.

You can send me grammar questions, suggestions and pet peeves, too — even those of you I’m not related to and may have never sung with.

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Answer: b.

Explanation:
To fashion is to make; fashioned means made. Old-fashioned means made in the old way.

And without the hyphen? Neither! Never! Not “old fashion,” not “old fashioned.” When we combine two words to use as an adjective, we hyphenate.

Google poll, searching for verbatim:
old-fashion — 43,600,000 hits
old fashion — 865,000,000 hits
old-fashioned — 320,000,000 hits
old fashioned — 381,000,000 hits

Oh dear, oh dear. The worst possible spelling is by far the most popular. I was impressed to see, among the search results, that a lot of people actually have it wrong — especially as “old fashion” — in their business names. A word of advice — if you’re ever starting a business, make sure that you don’t name it something that makes you look less intelligent than you’d like. Check your grammar!

And in case anyone’s wondering, the same rule would hold for “old-style” and “old-school.”

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“As a prominent cloud storage provider, security is crucial.”

Ah, the dangling modifier.

It starts out so purposeful but gets left hanging in the breeze.

“As a prominent cloud storage provider” is intended to modify something. In this case, it should be a company that provides cloud storage.

The sentence should go something like:

“As a prominent cloud storage provider, we know that security is crucial.” (Possibly as a lead in to a PR message in the wake of a data breach, but let’s not get sidetracked.)  Really, if your company can’t even properly identify the business in a sentence, should customers trust you with their data?

The dangling modifier is related to the misplaced modifier, in which case the modifier and the thing it modifies are both present but not properly arranged. (@GrammarGirl Mignon Fogarty explains misplaced and dangling modifiers at greater length.)

Misplaced modifiers are one of my favorite types of errors, because they lead to fun sentences like “The code needs to be rewritten badly.”

Funny, right? I still crack up remembering my grade five teacher explaining misplaced modifiers with the sentence “I went out to chase the dog wearing my pajamas.”

See, grammar can be fun!

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Answer: a

Explanation:
The verb form is two words. As a noun or adjective it’s one. Once you set up your network properly, you should have a secure setup. And it shouldn’t take too long if you don’t run into too many setup glitches.

There are a lot of similar cases that people tend to get confused about. Here’s a list with a few more examples:

Verb: work out– I was too tired to work out very hard.

Noun: workout — I did my workout every day, even if it was a lame effort.

Adjective: workout — I need a new workout playlist to motivate me.

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Verb: check out– You should always go over your order carefully before you check out.

Noun: checkout — I didn’t realize the manual was missing until I got to the checkout.

Adjective: checkout — I’ll be more careful in future so I can avoid getting glared at by the checkout attendant.

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Verb: back up – I forgot to back up my data last night.

Noun: backup — I got yelled at for not creating a backup and losing my changes.

Adjective: backup — I hope I never forget to make a backup copy again.

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Verb: make up — I’ll just make up some excuse about my grandmother dying to explain why my paper is late.

Noun: makeup — The makeup of my essay doesn’t follow the instructions.

Adjective: makeup — Darn! I forgot to write my makeup paper — and I’ve run out of grandmothers.

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Verb: drop out — I had to drop out of school after that essay fiasco.

Noun: drop-out — Now I’m a drop-out.

Adjective: drop-out — I’m exploring options for drop-out reentry programs that I can manage along with my checkout attendant job.

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Here are some resources for setting up a wireless LAN.

Now be safe out there, kids, get your work in on time, and look after your grandmothers.

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