A 51-year-old software engineer Bryan Henderson, has made over [more than?] 47,000 edits to Wikipedia since 2007.”
Mr. Henderson’s corrections only deal with the confusion of the verbs ‘to comprise’ and ‘to compose.’
And I get upset over an error that the great unwashed have used often enough to change the way we think.
Bravo, Mr. Henderson. Bravo for your quest. Congratulations for your software company, Giraffe Data Systems, which could have been responsible for Netflix, if not for Blockbuster. Kudos for the software program that alerts you when gross grammar errors appear on the site that more than one million people access each day.
I do wish you’d write a program that screams like a banshee when ‘everyday’ and ‘every day’ are used interchangeably.
Writing is curse.
Mr. Ryan, my English teacher at San Marino High School, is responsible for my obsession with grammar. It was 1961. I can’t remember the topic of the doomed cursive piece I had written and re-written five times before dropping it on his desk one Monday morning.
Tuesday morning, Mr. Ryan walked up the aisle to my desk, shook his head and placed my essay in front of me. The red “F” stamped in the left-hand corner burned my eyes. All three pages had contracted a bad case of the measles. My mother demanded to know why her spotless daughter had received this grade. In my family, a “C” was equal to an “F”. An “A-“ no better than a “B”.
Mr. Ryan nailed it. My writing sucked. “You don’t know the rules. You have to know the rules before you can break them.” I started to sleep with “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White. I checked out the “AP Stylebook “ from the library seventeen times, until a librarian took pity on me and gave me an outdated copy.
The Curse
I wrote copy for more than 20 years. First, I wrote press releases. My boss, Al LeAnce, must have known Mr. Ryan. I wasn’t allowed to use adjectives or adverbs or words that ended in ‘ly’. “Just the facts. Facts don’t need embellishment.”
More Than
“XYZ Corp. announced an increase of more than $1 billion in assets.” “Over your head” is where I will hold Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary the next time you confuse your words.
When the rules were as much a part of me the birthmark on my left cheek, I started writing advertising copy. Now, I try to help other writers.
I still won’t use ‘over’ to mean ‘more than: – even though AP Stylebook announced that ‘over’ could be substituted for ‘more than’ in 2014.
No hope for American english. Until this morning.