Animal Confusion

Gorilla:

Guerrilla:

When people want to describe marketing, tactics, or warfare, they should use the latter of these two homophones. Although the former makes for some amusing mental pictures.

Correct usage, in other words: guerrilla marketing, guerrilla tactics, and guerrilla warfare.

Gorillas are generally nicer than guerrillas -- if I got lost in a jungle, I'd rather meet the gorilla. What that says about the marketing, the tactics, and the warfare, I leave it to yourselves to determine.

Of + Verb = Bad Country Song

All I can guess about this common grammatical error is that people write what they hear. Let me explain what they hear, then:

Should've.
Would've.
Could've.
Might've.

In other words, a contraction of should have, might have, etc. What they think they hear is this:

"I should of gone to the store earlier."

Gone is a (conjugated) verb, therefore nothing can be of it or belonging to it. There is no "of gone." Although maybe if you're a country singer, you can come up with a song in which the lyrics go something like "It's the slow sad sound of gone." Go for it. Have fun. Just please don't write "should of."

"I should've gone to the store earlier."

"I should have gone to the store earlier."

But I didn't, so we're still out of milk. Maybe I'll do that now.

Spelling Snark

I think I'll clear up a couple of issues for the world ... or I would, if the world read my blog.

Listen up, world! If you mean voilà!, as in French for "See there!", please say so. Please, please do not say "viola!", which is either 1) a musical instrument or 2) a flower or 3) an old-fashioned first name. Seriously—I have studied several languages at the alphabet level, and have never yet run across one in which the vowel combination "io" makes the sound "wah."

Similarly, "I before E except after C and when sounding like A as in neighbor or weigh (and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May ... Brian Regan, you rock)—and in the word 'weird!' " According to The Oatmeal, every time anyone spells it "wierd," a dolphin gets run over by a jet ski. Think of the dolphins!

The Oatmeal covered a lot of other common spelling errors in the above link. That piece is a little crass in places (okay, it's a lot crass all the way through—sorry about that), but by the end it's definitely harder to forget that there is no A in "definitely."