“Between” is a demanding word. You can’t be between one thing. Since you never will get more than one second shot, we ask: The time between the second shot and….what? We suspect they meant, “time between first and second COVID shots…” Then they repeat the mistake.

The Horribly Wrong team calls this a grammatical optical illusion. Your eye and brain want “couple” to be plural. A team or a school or a company sounds like it should be plural, but like those examples, couple is singular. So the couple “helps” foster kids. Good for them. (That sentence is OK, because we no longer are modifying “couple.”) Also found in a national newspaper: "None of us is." Should it be "None of us are?" No. "None" essentially is a contraction of "no one," and when you say "No one of us is," the answer is clear. But, the Rules Committee’s Lou Ann notes, “The language evolves.” She says some corners have ruled phrases such as “couple help” and “none are” as acceptable. The Horribly Wrong team will not. NOTE: Our British cousins violate this as a rule, as in “Arsenal won their match one-nil.” Another cause of the American Revolution. Look it up.

We don’t take pleasure in calling out our friends in local TV news. But as we’ve said, they make it too easy. Four grammar mistakes in three lines! First, the headline is a classic misplaced modifier that suggests the parents, not the child, were forced to live in a garage. Then, the redundant “13-year-old teen.” Then, teenagers’ instead of teenager’s. And, of course, it’s the child who was adopted; the arrestees are the adoptive parents. And a bonus: You’re not arrested for something. The last sentence gets it right. Whew! Did we miss anything?

This place probably makes great pizza with the money it saves on writers. Where to start? For one thing, the place must have sold all its punctuation marks to pay for pepperoni. How about, as with good pizza, we start from scratch? “America’s first pizzeria, Lombardi’s, opened in 1905 in New York. Let’s celebrate tonight at (name). Two dollars off any pizza!”

You go, Nathan Chen! Many, many eyes are on you. But not all. Really. Readers: Are we being too exacting? Should we sometimes allow hyperbole? The Horribly Wrong team says no, but let’s discuss.

And we go to the video archives for Segment 12: Even newspapers goof. https://youtu.be/h62Bvtfphzo

From the mailbag:

Dr. Baruch Kahana, Miami Beach, posed two questions to the Rules Committee (edited for space):

1. “The other day I read: ‘A TD Bank was evacuated Wednesday after a robbery suspect barricaded their self inside the bathroom.’ Are gender-based pronouns — he, she, etc. — no longer kosher? Also: I recently encountered the phrase ‘pregnant person’. I’ve delivered a number of babies in my day, and each of those babies came out of a woman.” Response: English is cursed with a lack of a gender-neutral pronoun. If the police didn’t specify a sex, you can write, “A TD Bank was evacuated Wednesday after a robbery suspect barricaded himself or herself in a bathroom.” That’s not good. Our policy always has been, “Write around it.” So: “A TD Bank was evacuated, police said, after a person robbed it and refused to leave a restroom.” (Notice we got around the horrid word “suspect” and also accurately described the loo, which did not have a bathtub.) As to the pregnant woman, it’s hard to argue the doctor’s point. He was there.

2. “I recently read: ‘Public assistance is needed to identify the people who robbed an ATM.’ Shouldn't that be ‘stole?’” Response: It should be “stole from.” The Rules Committee’s Lo Ann Frala says “robbed” and “stole” often are “used interchangeably and incorrectly. There are nuances and differences of legality.” She cites no less than the Canadian federal government’s “Writing Tips Plus: “Rob and steal once were exact synonyms, but in modern usage they differ. A thief will rob a place or person (of objects), but steal objects (from a place or person).” And from criminaldefenselawyer.com: “Robbery, like theft, involves taking someone's property without the owner's consent, but it has some elements that theft doesn't require. Robbery involves taking property from a person and using force, or the threat of force, to do it.”

Readers: "Something Went Horribly Wrong" features samples of bad writing we see nearly every day. You can participate! Be our duly deputized “grammar police:” Your motto: “To protect and correct.” Send in your photos of store signs, street signs, newspaper headlines, tweets, and so on. It doesn’t have to be a grammatical error. It can be just what we call “cowardly writing.” Include your name and home town so we properly can credit you. You're free to add a comment, although we reserve the right to edit or omit. Now get out there! Send to Eliot@eliotkleinberg.com

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NOTE: Eliot and Lou Ann are available for speaking engagements, and can travel. Reach us through the comments section. Just think of all of your employees getting back to work on a Monday, their heads filled with all the ways we’ve shown them to be better communicators!