SmithWriting Blog

Oh, I just love this time of year. Snow is falling, carolers are singing, Christmas tree’s are twinkling—wait, “Christmas tree’s”? Really?

Sorry to be the grammar grinch, folks, but I can’t help but feel a bit grouchy when faced with holiday-related misspellings and typos in ads, signs, and greeting cards. Just because we’re filled with cheer and goodwill (and eggnog) doesn’t mean we should abandon proper grammar and style.

Here are just a few of the grammatical errors I’ve encountered this holiday season:

Seasons Greetings
Don’t get me wrong: I’m more than happy to give and receive warm greetings of the season—but only in a grammatically correct way. You see, the proper term is Season’s Greetings, with an apostrophe before the “s” signifying a possessive.

Christmas tree’s for sale
As we know from my post on the proper use of apostrophes, these marks are primarily used for forming possessives and indicating missing letters or numbers—neither of which apply to the sale of Christmas trees. Vendors beware: The next incorrect sign I encounter may end up with red editing marks!

New Years Eve
Reading about New Years Eve and New Years’ Eve celebrations makes me as sick as drinking too much champagne. Note to party promoters: It’s New Year’s Eve (and New Year’s Day).

The Smith’s
Again, it’s that pesky apostrophe! When you’re addressing a Christmas card to a family of people with the last name Smith, you should address it to The Smiths. (The only time you’d use an apostrophe is if you’re addressing something belonging to the Smith family, and, in that case, you’d add the apostrophe after an “s,” as in “The Smiths’ dog.” But that would be weird. Why not just call her Riley?)

Tis
I suppose I should let this one go, since the term in question dates back to the 1400s and is rarely used these days. But, if you want to be grammatically correct, the proper spelling is ’Tis, with an apostrophe before the “t” to indicate the missing letter “i.” (’Tis is a contraction of “it is,” as in ’tis the season for good wishes and bad grammar.)

Season’s greetings, everyone!

Filed by rebecca at 3:19 pm under Grammar guide
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In my last post, I wrote about how the New Oxford American Dictionary named “unfriend” its 2009 Word of the Year. Well, apparently there is more than one “Word of the Year,” and Merriam-Webster recently announced that “admonish” tops its annual Words of the Year list. This list is based on actual user lookups to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Admonish, which means “to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner,” gained popularity when Congress voted to admonish U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” at President Obama during a televised speech last September. Scores of people who were unfamiliar with the term went to the Internet to find its meaning.

Most of the top 10 terms can be tied to significant news events this year: The word “emaciated” made the list because so many people looked it up after it was used to describe the condition of Michael Jackson’s body after his death in June. The word “rogue” sparked a good deal of interest as a result of the November release of Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue.” And the word “philanderer” was looked up frequently due to news stories about indiscretions by Rep. Mark Sanford and talk show host David Letterman (and it’s probably still being looked up a lot these days thanks to Tiger Woods).

Here are the 10 most looked-up words on merriam-webster.com this year:

1. admonish (verb): to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner
2. emaciated (adjective): wasted away physically
3. empathy (noun): the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it
4. furlough (noun): a leave of absence from duty granted especially to a soldier
5. inaugurate (verb): to induct into an office with suitable ceremonies
6. nugatory (adjective): of little or no consequence
7. pandemic (adjective): occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the population
8. philanderer (noun): of a man: to have casual or illicit sex with a woman or with many women; especially: to be sexually unfaithful to one’s wife
9. repose (verb): to lay at rest
10. rogue (adjective): resembling or suggesting a rogue elephant especially in being isolated, aberrant, dangerous, or uncontrollable

Filed by rebecca at 10:17 pm under For the love of words
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