Nurse refuses student inhaler during asthma attack

[tblue37]

151. No, I have to disagree with your final comemnt.

Many--probably most--people make spelling, grammar, and usage errors, and that should not make them feel that they have no right to express political opinions--or any other kind of opinion.

Most people, including those on our own side, make errors.

Furthermore, even those of us who are supposed to be "experts" make mistakes. I can't type at all, so my posts often have typos in them, and I don't always catch them, either.

I actually didn't mean to be a butthead when I made my original comment to FarPoint, though it obviously sounded like buttheadedness on my part. The first time "should of" showed up, I put it down to a typo and didn't say anything. But the second time triggered my obnoxious inner schoolmarm, because it is something I see so often that it is like fingernails on a blackboard for me. (Oddly enough, the sound of fingernails on a blackboard doesn't bother me at all.)

The problem is that "should've" really does sound like "should of," so people fall into the error almost automatically, because they tend to forget that the last part of a contracted verb is a verb rather than something else, so they spell it phonetically.

I often see a different error that is similarly triggered. When people begin a sentence with "There's" (or "There is&quot they forget that the "[font color = "red"]'s[/font]" is actually a verb, so it must agree with the subject of the sentence.

That confusion is exacerbated by the fact that the normal subject-verb order of the English sentence is inverted when the sentence begins with "There's" (or "There is&quot , so people fail to connect the verb with its subject, and sometimes even mistake the adverb "there" for the subject of the sentence.

Thus we get incorrect sentences like "There's many reasons why people might make such a mistake," or "There is several students waiting in the cafeteria."

I think that the error occurs less often with "There is" than with "There's" at the beginning of the sentence, though, because although in both cases the subject-verb inversion prevents some people from noticing the subject-verb agreement problem, at least in the "There is" sentence, the entire verb is apparent. In the "There's" sentence, though, just as in the case of "should of," the contracted verb just doesn't look or even feel like a verb, so the writer completely forgets that it is a verb and renders it phonetically.