Kirk Mahoney . com

I saw this in an email message.

Problem:
The contraction is improperly formed.

Explanation:
I saw “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader” on television last evening. A question was under the category of first-graded grammar, and it asked for the number of contractions in a particular sentence. The contestant — a working adult — got the answer wrong because, as he admitted, he did not know what a contraction was.

Sad!

Today, I saw an email message in which the contraction for “you all” — an American colloquial form of the plural second-person pronoun — was spelled Y-A-APOSTROPHE-A-L-L.

A contraction is correctly formed by replacing one or more letters with an apostrophe, not by replacing one or more letters with one or more other letters and an apostrophe.

The contraction of “you all” is spelled Y-APOSTROPHE-A-L-L.

Solution:
“If y’all could lay out…”

I got this in an email message from Skype a couple of days ago.

Problem:
A contraction-forming apostrophe appears where it should not.

Explanation:
The word “it’s” is a contraction of “it is”; the apostrophe signifies the dropping of a letter (the “i” in “is”).

The required word is “its” (not “it’s”) because “its” is the possessive form of “it” (which refers to “Skype”).

Confusing “it’s” and “its” is a common English blunder.

A simple way to remember that “its” is the possessive form of “it” — a third-person pronoun — is to recognize that “his” is the possessive form of “he” — another third-person pronoun — and that neither “his” nor “its” has a possessive apostrophe.

Solution:
“Skype — social networking at its best”

I saw this on the back of a bank-by-mail envelope from my credit union.

Problems:
An apostrophe is missing from the contraction, and the verb used as an adjective should not be capitalized.

Explanation:
Whoever wrote what is printed on the back of the envelope was trying to use the contracted, everyday-speech form of “I am”.

Unfortunately, the contraction “Im” lacks the required apostrophe.

I believe that this is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis.

It’s simpler to write “Im” than to write “I’m” (two keystrokes vs. three keystrokes).

I also believe that the increasingly common practice of dropping required apostrophes has been influenced by people’s experience with text messaging.

• Given the typical limit of 160 characters in a text message, every character is precious, so dropping required apostrophes seems to many like a reasonable price to pay.
• Also, text messaging on most cellular telephones, which don’t have full QWERTY keyboards, is tedious, so dropping required apostrophes lets users of the simpler phones avoid this tedium.

The other problem is that “Save” — a verb used as an adjective to modify “envelopes” — is capitalized when it should not be.

Unnecessary capitalization has become another common English blunder.

I see this unnecessary capitalization more with nouns than with adjectives.

Maybe American English is becoming more like German, or maybe American English speakers are losing their confidence in how to capitalize and therefore randomly capitalize words that don’t require it.

Solution:
“I’m out of save/pay-by-mail envelopes.”

Although this is illustrative of bad grammar, it is somewhat logical.

Problem:
The contraction “don’t” is not a contraction of “does not”.

Explanation:
Forget about the source of contractions while you consider these plural forms:

• We won’t. We don’t.
• You won’t. You don’t.
• They won’t. They don’t.

Now, consider these singular forms:

• I won’t. I don’t.
• You won’t. You don’t.
• He won’t. He doesn’t.

In other words, only the third-person, singular contraction for not doing something uses “doesn’t” instead of “don’t”.

The reason for this is that the third-person, singular, non-contracted form for not doing something is “does not”, whereas all of the other non-contracted forms are “do not”.

From an outsider’s perspective, though, “He don’t.” is somewhat logical, especially when going by sound alone and when failing to remember that “don’t” is a contraction of “do” and “not”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following phrases (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “He doesn’t” — 5,770,000 matches
• “He don’t” — 5,230,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the phrase correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 1.10:1, which is a bit pathetic.

Solution:
“He doesn’t.”

This appeared on a motivational poster for teenagers.

Problem:
An apostrophe is required when contracting two words into one word.

Explanation:
“Whether you think you are wrong, …” would be the formal equivalent of what the poster writer wanted to say.

As I’ve written (Did you see the contraction that I just wrote?!), many people often confuse “your” and the contraction of “you are” to the point of writing “your” instead of the contraction.

A contraction requires an apostrophe to signify the removal of one or more letters in the formation of the contraction. For example, the apostrophe in “I’ve” signifies the removal of “ha” in the formation of the contraction from “I” and “have”.

In other words, an apostrophe must appear where one has removed the letter(s) to form the contraction.

Solution:
“Whether you think you’re wrong, …”

I heard this on a TV show.

Problems:
1. The verb doesn’t match the subject.
2. Double-negation nullifies the speaker’s intended message.

Explanation:
1. The pronoun “she” does not go with the verb “do”, even if the verb is in a contraction with “not”. The pronoun “she” requires “does” (or “doesn’t”), as in “She does …” (or “She doesn’t …”).
2. The “not” in the contraction combined later in the sentence with the “no” in “no more” leads to a sentence with a double-negative. Assuming that the speaker wanted to tell the listener that the third-party female (to which the pronoun “she” referred) no longer loved the listener, “no” should have been replaced with “any” in the sentence.

I believe that there are two forces that led to this double-trouble sentence.

The first force is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis: the single-syllable “don’t” is simpler to say than the double-syllable “doesn’t”.

The second force, I believe, is the influence on American English today of a relatively large population of native-Spanish speakers. If one uses a negative Spanish pronoun, adjective or adverb after a verb, the verb must be preceded by “no” (which means the same as “no” in English) or another negative pronoun or adjective.

For example, the pronoun “nada” in Spanish means nothing, and “encontró” means (he/she/it) found.

So to say “He found nothing.” in Spanish requires us to write “Él no encontró nada.” or more simply “No encontró nada.” — NOT “Encontró nada.” (or “Él encontró nada.”), which native-English speakers expect when first learning Spanish.

In other words, the above Spanish construction could be called a double-negative that is non-self-negating, and the construction is the correct way to write or say a such a negative in Spanish. In contrast and as far as I know, all double-negative constructions in English ARE self-negating.

As more native-Spanish speakers in the U.S. learn English, they will tend to use — mistakenly — (self-negating) double-negatives in English because (non-self-negating) double-negatives are a required part of their native language.

Solution:
“She doesn’t love you any more.”