Mariners “make due”
DMZ · February 24, 2005 at 2:21 pm · Filed Under Mariners
I was going to let this go because I was sure it would be corrected at any time, but this has been grating on me all day. MLB.com has a story up about the M’s and the rain in spring training up, and it’s headlined. “Notes: Mariners make due in rain”
It’s “make do”. “Make due” makes no sense.
To quote my “Garner’s Modern American Usage” (an excellent book I highly recommend if you’re at all into this kind of stuff)
make do is distressingly often written make due, a blunder —
Someone at MLB put this headline up, used it as the text for a link, and no one in the process has noticed that it’s wrong and makes no sense? Arrgghhh.
Also in that story, Snelling’s MRI results are supposed to come out tomorrow.
Comments
88 Responses to “Mariners “make due””
The deuce you say! Complaining about popular illiteracy will remain one of life’s great pleasures until April.
As long as we’re keeping score…
“begs the question” does not mean “raises the question”.
I hate that one, and it’s everywhere.
Re: “typos”
I remember receiving a letter from a semi-literate travel agent a few years back apologizing for her “Type-O mistake”…
Many have previously mentioned grammar and usage things that bother me. Two not mentioned are:
1. using compliment instead complement when two items complement each other.
2. misuing principal and principle. The principal always emphasized his principal principles.
You guys all seriously need to get a girlfriend……
Well, Street fixed it. That was fast…
DJC:
Maybe that’s because it’s subsidiary.
RE: #36
In the spirit of this thread, there is no missing comma. The rules (once again) have changed. In a list of three or more items, no longer should a comma be placed before “and.â€
There’s also the issue of the semicolon. I’d use Vonnegut’s words on the matter, but that might get me thrown in the moderation queue indefinately.
Language is a constantly changing entity. I think it’s more a matter of whether the point gets across rather than whether it’s completely wrong or not. English isn’t the same as it was 50 years ago, and it won’t be the same 50 years from now.
I live in Olympia. Is it the capitAl or the capitOl? I always forget…
Olympia is the capitOl of Washington, and the principal is your pal.
Paul, I’m afraid I have to correct you, there. A capitol is a building, a city can be a capital. Olympia is a capital city. It contains the capitol.
And IceX, while you’re correct, that rationale is also the first refuge of the willfully ignorant, which is not a group one should want to appear to belong.
How often recently have I seen Capital Hill (Seattle neighbourhood) referred to as Capitol Hill (home to the US Congress)?
Hmm, in all this grammatical pedantry I seem to have reverted to standard English spelling too.
Well in any case they changed it to ‘do’ on MLB.com.
And now my freinds and me can be grammatically correct.
#56, once people (DJC, myself, maybe others) mailed Street to point out the error instead of complaining about it, it’s no surprise it got fixed.
Who judges whom ignorant?
The term, “I could care less” now carries the same connotation as “I couldn’t care less”, despite the fact that the two variations have entirely different content. Language is ruled by majority. It isn’t spoken by just intellects or elitists. We’re just more sensitive to differences in it because the internet allows for easier access to information.
But that’s beside the point. I’m not arguing it as an excuse. I’m only arguing that for better or for worse, despite our bickering, language will change.
A whole nother one that kills me…
“try and verb”, as in, “You want WFB to try and hit the ball”. “And” is a conjunction. You are not asking WFB to: 1) Put the ball on trial, then 2) Mete out corporeal punishment regardless. It’s a transitive form of the verb “try” that requires an infinitive (to verb) or present-progressive (verb+ing) verb form if you’re attempting a verb. If you just want you to try the nachos, well, you ought to.
And there’s precisely why I never point out all these errors when I see them…
“And IceX, while you’re correct, that rationale is also the first refuge of the willfully ignorant, which is not a group one should want to appear to belong.”
I’m sorry, but the end of this sentence is structured terribly. I think we should all buy guns, load them, and stroke their barrels as we sit in a circle, talking about grammar until the sun comes up or we’re all dead.
You guys misspelled Blaine Newnham’s name not too long ago… and in fact, it’s still misspelled when any of you could have changed it at any time… therefore, I don’t think you guys should be playing Spellchecker and grammar police just to score some cheap points, with absolutely nobody. We already know you’re superior to anything we’d find on MLB.com, this just makes you sound petty.
That’s not the worst Mariner-related blunder by a major media outlet this week… In Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, they had Felix “the Bad Ass” Hernandez listed as a left-handed pitcher… I don’t know if that or leaving him out of their top 10 was a worse faux pas.
Why are there more comments here than in the Snelling thread?
#70: yeah, I know, but there’s no ability to edit one’s comment; I noticed it right after posting. A “to which” is missing from the beginning of the phrase. See, we all make mistakes.
Re 64: “How often recently have I seen Capital Hill (Seattle neighbourhood) referred to as Capitol Hill (home to the US Congress)?”
Hopefully always. Back in the day, some folks were hopeful that Seattle would be named the state capital. It didn’t happen, but the name stuck and it’s been Capitol Hill ever since.
As for anal proofreading, I can’t help it. I probably send five or six emails a week to the local papers. A couple of weeks ago it was Percy Allen calling Ray Allen a “shoe-in” for the All-Star game. Yesterday it was a markup problem with Derek’s column (runaway bold tag).
It usually takes only minutes to see the corrections made online and they seem to genuinely appreciate the help. So if you see something amiss and it bugs you, just let’em know.
Yeah, Seattle got the university as a consolation prize after losing the bid to become the capital. Capitol Hill is a name, not a description, so it gets to stay that way.
Here’s street’s response:
thanks and i do not write the headlines. but i do call in corrections when
wrong words are used. OUr motto at MLB.com, by the way, is “We are due to
make no mistakes.” Take care.
David Foster Wallace wrote a terrific piece on this general topic — what constitutes correct modern usage of American English — in Harpers Magazine a few years ago. http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html. It was nominally a review of the Garner book endorsed by Derek here. Wallace is always an amusing writer, and the article is remarkably fun considering the imposing potential of aridity raised by the topic.
A whole thread for grammar Nazis.
I never thought I’d see the day.
To repeat: Don’t sweat the small stuff like misspellings or its/it’s, but if the error is made repeatedly, or a comment on the error proves irresistible–as this one did–then vent.
Things change. BTW, when I last taught grammar and usage (’83), a rule was “Use the possessive case before a gerund.” Nowadays, I seldom see that.
And some incorrect expressions get used so often that they become correct. Once a cook said to me, “You probably don’t even know what AU JUS is?
BTW, has anyone heard about Snelling.
The joke behind “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”:
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, draws a gun and fires two shots into the air. As he is on his way out, the waiter asks him why. The panda hands him a badly punctuated wildlife manual. The waiter reads, “Panda: Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
[Rimshot]
“Woe is I” is a similar book written by New York Times copy editor Patricia T. O’Conner that folks interested in this kind of stuff might enjoy.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves is an excellent book (and a good example of why you should use that final comma in a list). I’m appalled by the dearth of commas in modern language.
If everyone used the final comma, the two phrases would be “eats shoots and leaves” and “eats, shoots, and leaves”. You’d need to get two commas wrong in order to be misunderstood. The version with just one comma shouldn’t really mean anything.
I highly recommend the book, along with “Crimes Against Logic” by Jamie Whyte.
81 posts. Unbelievable. On topic, too. Even more so. No complete sentences. Sorry.
Like I said, we all need to get a life.
We have a life. It’s all baseball and grammar and gaming, but it’s a life.
Man, we’re a bunch of geeks.
Re # 83: “Get a life.”? That’s what some people say about those of us who seriously follow baseball; or anyone who’s very interested in something they’re not.
My grandkids just spent a half-hour intensely watching a program on donuts. (Donuts?)
Different strokes for different folks.
I am proud to be a baseball fanatic who can argue grammar, but you must admit, it isn’t exactly the ‘ideal’ lifestyle in the view of mainstream America. I am fine with this lifestyle, however.
There are precious few places on the net where good grammar is appreciated… alt.usage.english, alt.possessive.its.has.no.apostrophe, but Usenet is almost unreadable these days.
WILLIE BLOOMQUIST IS THE BEST MARINER