It's New Year's Eve -- all day long

Every year I seem to have an argument with somebody as I point out to them that there is no such thing as "New Year's Eve day," or "New Year's Eve morning."

While many like to think the eve part of the phrase denotes evening, it is in fact the entire period, or day, before New Year's Day (also applies to the Christmas holiday).

From my Apple dictionary:

eve |ēv|
noun
the day or period of time immediately before an event or occasion : on the eve of her departure he gave her a little parcel.
• the evening or day before a religious festival : the service for Passover eve.

So please just leave it at New Year's Eve. If you want to be more specific, say New Year's Eve at 12:33 p.m.

Then they found more than a dozen dictionaries

Everyone messes up homonyms once in a while. But there are some pairs of words that trip up a great number of people more than others. Then and than are one example of a pair you are likely to regularly spot wrongly used. Amazingly, it's a pretty common error in newspapers (see this example of "less then" from the Detroit Free Press, among the 523 stories with that error currently found on Google News), an industry which at one time in the 20th century showed the way with their stewardship of the English language.

It's not difficult to get it right -- if you stop and think for a moment, you can get it correct every time. Just remember this: then refers to time, while than is used in comparisons:

• If ever there was a time, then this is it; if you want to die, then by all means leave a candle burning in your living room.
• Items in this store cost less than a dollar; it costs less than you think.

Back in the day it was what it was

For more than three decades, Lake Superior State University has been releasing a list of overused, wrongly used and annoyingly used words that came to prominence in the previous 365 days. The tradition began in 1976; these days the group that oversees the list is bombarded with suggestions from guardians of English.

In the past, phrases like "We're pregnant," "Back in the day," "It is what it is" and "blank is the new blank" have been shown the door. Words like "Sweet," "awesome" and "decimate," when they are wrongly used, generally in some new slang, have made the list. "Gitmo" was banned for sounding too much like a Japanese cartoon name and combined celebrity names like Brangelina were labelled as obnoxious by one nominator.

The full Lake Superior State University 2008 List of Banished Words is online for your viewing pleasure. The new list should be posted on New Year's Day.

Who's to blame ?

There's no doubt the proper use of the language has declined over the past 40 years. Standards have been lowered, parents don't take the time (or have the time) to help their children along, and for too long there has been a reluctance to fail students who don't make the grade (I graduated from college with people who still couldn't string a sentence together -- and this was a journalism program).

Barry Turner has the following opinion:

The culprits are many and varied. The rot set in early in the 1960s when schools adopted a libertarian approach to education which involved giving up on difficult subjects including grammar. Led on by politicians dedicated to mediocrity, (or ‘equality’ to use the accepted term) teachers were encouraged to set standards by the lowest common denominator. The impact on English was catastrophic as the best educationalists soon came to recognise. But it is easier to destroy than to build and the return to formal and effective learning still has a long way to go. One has only to listen to the delegates to an NUT conference to know that for many teachers clarity of thought let alone clarity of language is way beyond their capacity. Dimly aware of their failings, the incompetents look to technology to compensate for poor linguistic skills. We are now committed to making our children computer literate; no matter that most are illiterate in every other sense.

The decline of English language teaching in schools had its knock-on effect on academia. A recent survey found that nine out of ten graduates submit applications that are full of spelling and grammatical errors. Are we surprised? Pupils who are unable to express themselves clearly become students who are unable to express themselves clearly. Worse still, some then become university and college lecturers. To judge their standard of communication refer to any book list for higher learning.

You can read the whole article here.

Let's get it right

It's incredibly frustrating to see someone write "1970's." Or "lets play ball." Or "Cleveland rock's." Or "Its a Wonderful Life."

The above should, of course, be written as: "1970s," "let's play ball," "Cleveland rocks" and "It's a Wonderful Life."

The improper use of commas is prevalent -- and it's getting worse, particularly as so many people think apostrophe-S makes a plural word. They can be tricky, but it's really not that difficult to use them properly. The easiest way to remember the proper use of apostrophes is that they are used to denote possession or exclusion.

To explain a couple of the examples found above:

• Its is possessive, while It's is the contraction of It and Is (It is a wonderful life).
• Lets (allows) and Let's (the contraction of "let us," as in "let us play ball).

Just think of it this way:

• If you are removing letters, use an apostrophe in their place (let 'er rip, rock 'n' roll).
• If you are writing the possessive form of a singular word, add apostrophe-S (Cleveland's airport, Ohio's embarrassment).
• To make a plural word possessive, add the apostrophe after the S (Residents' anger, parents' pride).

And if you are simply making a word plural, just add an S.