Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Signalled or singled

FOUND IN A BOOK: The rich, the beautiful, the notorious and the well-born might wait in vain to be signalled out and paid special attention.

This is from a famous book, "Death on the Nile," written by one of my favorite writers, Agatha Christie.

Still, I can't help but thinking that she meant singled, not signalled.

Or maybe it's a British thing that I don't know about.

FOUND ONLINE: Ramsey said he had knee surgery to repair an "OCD" (basically a cartilage injury) in high school, and recovery from that took him off the football field for the first time.

If you have to explain what an OCD is (I have never heard of it), then why say it?

Ramsey said he had knee surgery to repair a cartilage injury in high school, and recovery from that took him off the football field for the first time.

ALSO FOUND ONLINE: Now that Kevin Hogan's 10-year career at Stanford (at least it seemed that way) is over, the Cardinal have a vacancy.

The Cardinal is the mascot for Stanford, and it's not a bird; it's a color (like red). I'd say the Cardinal has. Actually that sounds weird, too. It would be safer to say that the team has a vacancy.

CONTACT: I can be reached at tgilli52@gmail.com or nc3022@yahoo.com. Also, my Twitter handle is EDITORatWORK.



Anecdotes by Tom Gillispie


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1 comment:

  1. It's an interesting one because it looks almost plausible. I wonder if, perhaps, it was more common once upon a time than it is today because I can't recall seeing any instances. Fowler, though, in Modern English Usage (mine's the 1940 edition), has an article on the confusion of the two and produces three examples of what he calls a very common blunder

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