The Grammarnator has just returned from his first (and probably last) visit to Las Vegas, used as a jumping-off point to travel to Zion, Bruce and the Grand Canyon, and wishes to report on two inconsistencies that he noticed.
The first occurred as he wandered through The Forum Shops at Caesars Palace (more about that later) and saw a sign pointing the way to the Fountain of the God’s. Hence this exchange:
GRAMMARNATOR: You have an error in one of your signs.
CONCIERGE: Oh?
GRAMMARNATOR. Yes. The one over there says “Fountain of the God’s” but has an apostrophe in it.
CONCIERGE: That’s because there is more than one god.
GRAMMARNATOR: Well, to make a plural, you simple add an s: God, Gods. No apostrophe.
CONCIERGE: What do you want me to do about it? I’m not in charge of signage.
GRAMMARNATOR: Couldn’t you notify someone?
At this point the concierge rolled her eyes and the Grammarnator beat a tactful retreat. He did not ask the concierge to note that The Forum Shops consists of more than one shop, but that the complex is repeatedly designated The Forum Shops, not The Forum Shop’s.
The inconsistency is what troubles the Gramarnator, so he certainly noticed another in the description of on-plane movies offered by United.
ADMISSION: An admissions officer is caught off guard when she meets a student who might be the son she gave up for adoption.
THE COMPANY YOU KEEP. A former Weather Underground activist, is forced to leave his carefully constructed life and go on the run.
Now, there is no reason whatsoever to separate a subject and verb with a comma when the verb immediately follows the subject without any intervening phrase or clause, so Admission is correct, but not The Company You Keep.
What is nagging, however, is not the error itself, but the failure to notice that the identical sentence pattern is punctuated in different ways. Surely someone should be able to say, “Hmmm, these both can’t be right” and make them consistent, in which case being consistently wrong might be better than not thinking at all. The concierge truly believed that more than one means using an apostrophe.
Of course, noticing things – simply opening your eyes and thinking – might be dangerous for Caesars Palace. They would have to ask themselves whether the place belonged to one Caesar, like Julius, creating Caesar’s Palace, or to a bunch of them, like the Julio-Claudian Dynasty, which would give us Caesars’ Palace. The signage changes required then would cost a lot, necessitating a fourth Hangover movie to recoup the expenses in the form of the massive advertising for the place that the first and third movies in the franchise presented. And no one wants a fourth Hangover movie.
LETTERS TO THE GRAMMARNATOR
We’re flesh with ideas
I want to suggest a topic for the Grammarnator. My pet peeve of late is that EVERYONE says they want to “flush something out,” when they mean “flesh something out.” You might flush out your eye when it gets something irritating in it, or even flush out a bad idea, I guess. But what they mean is to take an undeveloped idea and further develop it – add flesh to the skeleton of an idea.
HELP!
Ellen Fries
