October 19, 2006: Issue 161
Want to hear some atrocious grammar? Flip on your radio or your iPod.
“Them other boys, they don’t know how to act,” Justin Timberlake sings in “SexyBack.”
“If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world?” Gary Lightbody asks in Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars.”
Our eyes are twitching over here in CE Land. While we can’t do anything about Justin and Snow Patrol, we can clean up grammar in quotes from homeowners and professionals. Our style is to fix tense, case, and number so that sentences inside quotation marks are grammatically correct.
exact quote: “So I find this house by accident, and then I just couldn’t get it out of my head.”
cleaned up: “So I find this house by accident, and then I just can’t get it out of my head.”
cleaned up: “So I found this house by accident, and then I just couldn’t get it out of my head.”
exact quote: “The architect left that decision up to Miguel and I.”
cleaned up: “The architect left that decision up to Miguel and me.”
exact quote: “That group of three of us have weighed in together for 12 years.”
cleaned up: “That group of three of us has weighed in together for 12 years.”
cleaned up: “Three of us have weighed in together for 12 years.”
The speaker’s voice is still there, and we’re not changing vocabulary. We’ve just made the speaker sound good—we’d want someone to do the same for us.
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