It's 8 PM on a Wednesday. Fernando is about to close when a truck pulls up. Fernando mutters to himself, “Eh, more money,” and does not forbid the young woman who drives the vehicle from entering and perusing the store.
As she passes through the threshold Fernando takes note of the words upon the black sweatshirt she wears as a form of advertisement for a local business. They read in part “No job to BIG or to small.”
Fernando cannot let this abomination stand without comment.
“You realize your sweatshirt has some mistakes on it,” he says to her as she brings her tag to the counter.
“Oh, really?” she asks, pulling her arms up into the sleeves and rotating it to read what is written on the back. “I don't see anything wrong.”
“You've got the wrong 'to.' The shirt uses the prepositional spelling when the adverbial one would be correct.”
These words are lost to her. “Huh?”
“The way your shirt reads, one could just as easily say 'No job from big or from small' and have the same grammatical structure. You might want to mention that to whoever greenlit the shirt's design to have it fixed for any future printings.” Then Fernando pauses for a moment, pondering. “Whomever,” he continues. “It's no good for me to correct others' mistakes when I just fall into my own.”
The young woman stares goggle-eyed at Fernando until he returns to the comfortable realm of supplier-consumer relations and says, “It comes to two dollars.”
C'est très amusant.
ReplyDeleteNB, however: You hyper-corrected yourself here. "Whoever greenlit" is correct because the person doing the greenlighting is a grammatical subject, hence "who" not "whom."
I think it's mostly the atrocious word-salad grammar order I used in that rambling sentence that prompted it. Had I phrased the sentence as "You might want to mention to whomever that[...]," the "to whomever" would be a prepositional phrase functioning as an indirect object, so that's where the thought process was churning. I'm certainly not a professional linguist by any means, and I could very well be wrong. But stuff like two/to/too and their/there leaves no excuses.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment! It fortifies me to know that people are actually reading the things that I vomit forth on the internet!