Author: Kirk

“If ya’all could lay out…”

Contractions

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…”

“If I would have known, …”

Verbs

This construction bothers my wife, so I decided to investigate.

The problem with people using “If he would have” where they mean “If he had” instead is that the two expressions have different meanings.

  • The expression “If he would have” assumes that he would not.
  • The expression “If he had” assumes only that he did not.

Look at these two constructions:

  1. If John would have gone to the golf course at 8 a.m., then we would not have had to call Jim.
  2. If John had gone to the golf course at 8 a.m., then we could have started on time.

Here are the explanations for the above two constructions:

  1. John would not go to the golf course, so we had to call Jim.
  2. John did not go to the golf course, so we did not start on time.

How to put these blog posts in Gmail

General

If you use the Gmail from Google, you probably know that something called “Web Clips” appear near the top of the Gmail Inbox page.

A “Web Clip” is a link to an article in an RSS feed.

This website publishes (syndicates) the blog posts in an RSS feed.

So you can use the Google “Web Clip” technology to keep up with the KirkMahoney.com blog posts through your Gmail interface.

When you have set up Gmail in this way, you’ll see something like the following, from July 2, 2008, at the top of your Gmail Inbox page:

   Kirk Mahoney . com – “Bouillon” vs. “Bullion” – Jul 2

When you see this in the Web Clip row in Gmail, you can click the link to go straight to that blog post at KirkMahoney.com.

Here are the steps to putting these blog posts in Gmail:

  1. Log in to Gmail.
  2. Click the Settings link at the top of the page.
  3. Click the Web Clips link in the row of tabs.
  4. Enter “kirkmahoney.com/feed” (without the quotation marks) in the Search by topic or URL field.
  5. Click the [Search] button
  6. Click the [Add] button to the left of Kirk Mahoney . com

That’s it! Along with whatever other RSS feeds are set up for your Gmail account, you will now see clickable titles and their dates for KirkMahoney.com blog posts at the top of your Gmail Inbox page.

Tip: If you want to delete any RSS feeds from Gmail, click the My Clips link on the Settings tab-page and then click the remove link to the right of that feed.