You slay me! But the correct word here is slain.

We discussed this use of unnecessary geographical verbiage in our January 2021 segment on redundancies. Anyone who sees this flyer likely already knows Davie is in Florida. Especially if they’re familiar with the place that’s 100 yards down the road. And unless you plan to write the garden shop a postcard, of what value is the ZIP code? Just say Davie! Really!

Here’s the redundancy rule again again. If you can delete one of the two words and the sentence still works, it’s redundant. Just say “26 bodies.” (Note: We have fun finding grammar goofs. We acknowledge our exercises seem silly in light of the horrors happening in Ukraine.)

We post the same mistake’s over and over and it seem’s its no use. Why do people want to use apostrophe’s when theres no need to do so? Its enough to make you tear out your hair in piece’s!

We’ve discussed this in the past as well. The operative number here isn’t six. It’s one. One child in six struggles with hunger. One in six children struggles with hunger.

Every time we see an outrageous misplaced modifier — a topic to which we devoted a segment in January 2022 — we just scratch our heads that no one at the source noticed what we saw instantly. You probably did so as well. But this banner stayed on the bottom of the screen for several minutes. Police are searching for suspects, but only after the cops killed six people and injured 12? We’re going to say that’s not what happened.

(PS: Look at panel to the right. When this network returned to the story an hour later, it clearly had realized the mistake because it used mostly the same sentence but reworked it.)

And we go to the video archives for Segment 16: That dang comma. https://youtu.be/BOMaOxR3y_0

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!