Author: Kirk

“… recognize your Employee’s and Peers!!”

Apostrophes, Capitalization, Common English Blunders, Foreign Languages, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

I saw this in a message from a corporation to its employees yesterday.

Problems:
1. Two exclamation marks appear where only one should appear.
2. Common nouns are capitalized even though they should not be.
3. An apostrophe appears where it does not belong.

Explanation:
The corporate message encouraged readers to nominate others for recognition.

The full sentence was “Please be sure to recognize your Employee’s and Peers!!”

One problem with this sentence is the second exclamation mark at the end of the sentence, as if the first exclamation mark were insufficient.

Can you imagine putting two periods at the end of a sentence? That would be nonsensical, right? Putting two exclamation marks at the end of a sentence is just as nonsensical.

Unfortunately, this seems to be an increasingly common blunder in American English.

Another problem is the capitalization of the two common nouns. There is nothing special about an “employee” or a “peer” that requires capitalization in this sentence.

Unfortunately, this also seems to be an increasingly common blunder in American English, as if a huge contingency of Germans had moved to the U.S. and started to misapply the German approach to capitalization to all nouns in English.

The third problem is the most glaring. An apostrophe was inserted with the pluralization of “employee”, which is incorrect.

Solution:
“… recognize your employees and peers!”

ShareThis

General

I promised on the first anniversary of KirkMahoney.com that I would look at ways to make this website more useful to you.

One way is to make it easier for you to share what I write with friends and family.

ShareThis is a technology that supports this.

Until today, I did not have a ShareThis link on most pages. Now, you will find a ShareThis link near the bottom of each blog post, even if you look at it after it originally appears.

As explained at the ShareThis website, ShareThis makes sharing hassle-free through social-networking sites such as these:

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Even more instantaneously, ShareThis lets you send notifications about what you are reading to friends and family via:

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I hope that you find this change helpful. If you have other ideas for how to improve KirkMahoney.com, please let me know through my contact form!

“Dwarves” vs. “Rooves”

Nouns, Plurals, Versus

I thought of these two words after learning recently that the singular form of one of them relates to Fannie Mae.

Problem:
One of these is not a proper word.

Explanation:
Fannie Mae — the U.S. Federal National Mortgage Association — has been in the news a lot recently, given the recent failures in the U.S. mortgage and banking industries.

I learned the other day that a “dwarf” in Fannie Mae lingo is the name given to a pool of mortgage-backed, Fannie Mae-issued securities with a maturity of 15 years.

As I wrote earlier this year, the plural form of the singular noun “roof” is “roofs” and never “rooves”.

In contrast, the plural form of the singular noun “dwarf” is either “dwarfs” — spelled D-W-A-R-F-S — or “dwarves” — spelled D-W-A-R-V-E-S.

This gives us the solution.

Solution:
“Dwarves” is a proper word (a plural form of the singular noun “dwarf”). “Rooves”, in contrast, is not a proper word.