Let's get this out of the way: I am not perfect. My grammatical prowess has seen a steep decline since I was in school. Now, I tend to write like I talk. Part of the reason I write daily is to break that habit and become a better writer.That being said:
Today, I read this in the newspaper: "Inside a rental car, police found $7,500 that the women had gotten Wednesday at a Wells Fargo branch in Junction City using the same fraudulent name."
Had gotten? The word you are looking for, Carrie Petersen, is "got". A better word would be "received".
Had I been reading the story on the internet, I would have ignored the error. I hold newspaper writers to a higher standard, I guess.
Maybe Carrie's not an idiot. Maybe she is a victim of a poor education.
Many of my friends and family are teachers... and I love them dearly...so I hate to be critical... but here goes:
Yesterday, Madison was studying for her science quiz on the skeletal system. She pointed to all her bones and named them all correctly, except the bones in her lower leg. She called them her tibia and fibia. I work in orthopedics, I hear "fibia" all the time, it is a common error. I don't expect the average Joe to know that the correct name is fibula. I do, however, expect the person who is teaching kids the names of bones to get it right.
I told Madison that the bones between her knee and ankle are the tibia and fibula. She started to argue that it must be "fibia" because that's what Mrs. Winston says, but she thought better of it when she quickly realized that I was right. (Also, I told her to go look in a book.) Then, she realized that teachers can be wrong. I watched as Mrs. Winston fell off her pedestal. I hope she didn't fracture her fibia when she landed.
When I was sent to Texas for my senior year of high school, there was a teacher there that drove me crazy. She was our English teacher. ENGLISH!
ReplyDeleteOne day during class, she is talking about endangered living things in our ecosystem. She talked about the SAL-MUN being endangered. She pronounced SAL like it was her uncle's name.
After hearing this mispronounced a few times AND being from the NW, I felt it was my duty to provide correction. After all, I was a high school senior and knew everything. I silently raised my hand and waited to be called on.
Here I am, in a sea of kids I don't really know because I'm fresh off the boat from Washington. When Miss Alley called on me, I politely corrected her and said, "It's pronounced samun, Miss Alley." She tells me that in Texas and all other parts of the country, people are allowed to pronounce things differently. Basically, it's the tomato/tomahto argument.
I encouraged her to look it up in the dictionary, of which she did, and she silently stood corrected in front of the class.
damn straight, samun. Delicious with fill-it mig-non.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't get me started on the teachers who can't spell....