Back in college–more years ago than I care to think about–I learned from my English education professor and mentor that as a teacher, I had to be curator. I took that lesson seriously. As a teacher, I loved finding examples of bad grammar and diction in the wild. I even gave bonus points to students who brought me examples they had seen. I believed doing so helped them recognize errors when they saw them.
Social media gives me way more opportunities these days. Here’s one of my favorites recently posted in the Murdered by Words sub on Reddit.
I’ll elaborate a bit just in case someone out here doesn’t get the joke. I’ll fix the error in the original sentence by adding the apostrophe in you’re.
You’re talking to an expert, dummy. -> The word dummy is a noun of address, requiring it to be set aside from the rest of the sentence by a comma.
You’re talking to an expert dummy. -> The person claiming to be an expert is actually an expert dummy.
(As a side note, that disrespectful word would not have been allowed in my classroom, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
In short, the original poster who seemingly called himself an expert intended for dummy to be used as a noun of address and used a comma accordingly but failed to include the apostrophe in you’re. The person who wrote the response let the OP know that the the latter is the actual dummy, maybe because of the grammar error although perhaps not. I have no idea of the contents of the previous conversation, but I thought the exchange was a good example anyway.
Never stop learning,
Erin
PS: Should I capitalize Reddit? It’s a proper noun. But reddit is not stylized with an initial capital letter. Facebook’s logo also has a lower-case initial letter, but I’ve never seen anyone call it facebook in writing. If the entity for which you write doesn’t have a style guide that addresses the question, I say capitalize both. The product developers may have a different opinion. Regardless, this dilemma would make a good essay question for a test.
PPS: How do you pluralize the word Lego? Is it an adjective, as in Lego bricks? Is it Legos? Or is it like the word sheep and pluralized Lego? I think this quandary could be another creative essay question for an exam.
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