But if you’re going to use such contractions, use them properly.  Gotta is a contraction of got to; it’s not a contraction of got a.  And so it should be used.

“I gotta go to the toilet” is fine.

“I gotta feeling” is not, Black Eyed Peas.

That said, it didn’t seem to bother Joe Public, as it was the biggest selling track out of the first one billion downloaded from iTunes.  And I bought it, in spite of my grammatical disappointment.

The couple met at 9:30am.
He went to bed at 11:45pm.
Schumacher’s 1:34.236 was the best lap time of the practice session.
He ran the marathon in 3:25:23.

As well as avoiding confusion, the above style is somewhat quaint.
Update: when working in business, the 24-hour clock should be used exclusively, with no separator between the hours and the minutes. (Thanks to Paul Clarke for highlighting this clarification.)

The meeting will take place at 1330 GMT (0830 EST).

Given the services we offer, I expect these latter emails to be flawless—if you can’t get your own, short emails right, then what confidence do I have that you can do the same for one of our clients?

I recently received such a request, consisting of six lines of content, together with a salutation and valediction.  Below were the errors I picked up:

• The Dear Sir/Madam did not come with a corresponding Yours faithfully.  Harsh in today’s less formal world, but a tradition that should be upheld, for the time being, at least.
• Proofreader was sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not.
• The Oxford comma was used in one instance, but not in another.
• The lady used quotation marks around words not warranting them, much like an annoying person might sign visually in a bar conversation.  E.g. “[you] would, naturally, take a ‘cut’”.
• A spaced, single hyphen had been used instead of an em dash before a separated clause.

I politely pointed out some of these issues to the lady, that she might be more successful in looking for other work.  She refuted many of them, the worst defence being that her keyboard didn’t do em dashes.  (Yes it does: ALT+0151.)

Now some of the issues I raised may sound pedantic.  But given the subject matter, pedantry is essential.  Our reputation is founded on attention to detail, picking up issues that our clients don’t spot but which their clients may smart at.

I’m not asking us to can our respective versions of English—British, American, Australian, Canadian etc. I’m instead suggesting that a new version of English is created that would, over time, supersede our respective versions, taking the loveliness from each and consolidating it into a single set of rules that people can abide by in certain media, predominantly the web at first.

And I’m not suggesting that any one of our beautiful set of idiosyncrasies overrules those of the other countries’. There are some beautiful American constructs; and some equally beautiful British ones. I’m sure the same is true of the other variants, although I’m less familiar with these.

To achieve the goal, I’m proposing we first brainstorm the inconsistencies. And then we bring together five leading literary luminaries representing each of the English variants to agree on which version is preferable, leaving aside their local bias.

The whole process would strengthen the language and bring closer the English-speaking world.

Thoughts?

Mum should of gone to Iceland.

I must stress that this is not the actual phrase they used.  They used more business-like phrases.  But you get the picture.

Speech has always influenced the development of written language.  But the world we now live in is made up of people whose English education is often, at best, questionable—people who, even if educated appropriately to suspect a mistake, have neither the time nor the inclination to search for the truth.  This means that mistakes like that above will become increasingly prevalent with time, which is a shame.

The correct construct is:

Mum should have gone to Iceland.

Or indeed:

Mum really shouldn’t have gone to Iceland.  Especially now that they’ve fired Kerry Katona.

The word that everyone was reaching for was tenet.  And although one person correctly used the word, his colleagues used tennent and tenor.

And their repeated use of the incorrect variants was such that I was forced to question my own confidence that tenet was indeed the correct variant.  It is.

Chrome’s Metropolis is expensive, and well worth the price if you live car-light and don’t use a rack and panniers or Xtracycle.

Most people would use the word but after the comma, signifying the high price as a weakness.  But, like the positioning of Stella Artois, the and positions the product’s high price in a positive light, alongside well worth the price.

A lovely little device.

And the interface does not allow for spell-checking.

The dreadfully constrained interface and the lack of a spell-checker make for out-of-office emails littered with typos and grammatical heathenry, an email that is sent to way more people than any other.  I would estimate that over half of those I receive contain at least one error.

Today’s examples:

• I am out of the office until Friday 22nd May and will limited access my emails during this time
• I am out of the office at a and will be back at work on the 26th May 2009

Please.  Copy your email into Word.  Read it, check it and double-check it before turning your out of office on.  Thank you.

The double-hyphen looks hideous, but it’s as if I should give them credit for trying.  How about trying a bit harder and typing ALT+0151 (on the number keypad, not the top row).  Or if you’re in WordPress (I am, don’t you know), hit the Insert Custom Character button sporting a Ω symbol, having hit the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink button).  The em dash can be found on the second row, fifth symbol from the right.

Here you’ll find more on the correct use of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes.

Laziness through double-click and “intelligent” drag selecting gives an outcome that jars. With me at least.

My favourite part of the article was the paragraph-hungry BBC’s decision to separate these two sentences into two paragraphs.

Two years ago Mr Costermans completed a tour of France piloting a light aeroplane.

He was accompanied by an instructor and a navigator.

Surely the second sentence is a sufficient qualification of the first to negate the need for the carriage return, line feed.

Encourage: inspire with confidence; give hope or courage to
Entourage: support group

Homophone: one of two or more words with different origins and meanings but sounding the same
Homophobe: one who hates or fears homosexual people

Any other non-trivial examples?

1045: And we’re off – Sarah Stevenson versus Maria del Rosario Espinoza of Mexico. Can the Doncaster lass keep her head while all around her are losing theres’? The 20-year-old Mexican is the current world middleweight champion, a title she won in Beijing last year.

Fortunately, they “corrected” it quickly to:

1045: And we’re off – Sarah Stevenson versus Maria del Rosario Espinoza of Mexico. Can the Doncaster lass keep her head while all around her are losing theirs’? The 20-year-old Mexican is the current world middleweight champion, a title she won in Beijing last year.

A couple of heinous errors from Ben Dirs, whose name is itself a stroke of genius.

In the extract below from the Economist’s London Stock Exchange index, he suggests that pasty should read pastry.

“In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.”

Some research needed before you go correcting people, Stephen.

The above screenshot from the Lynx website has addressed the error, albeit with the apostrophe quite clearly added as an afterthought; the TV is yet to catch up. It reminds me of Cadbury’s Creme Egg slogan, which temporarily read “How do you eat your’s?”

Maybe my concern of 1998 that the apostrophe is a dying punctuation mark is coming true. But maybe not, given that it’s cropping up in places it shouldn’t. Hopefully my voting it one of the seven wonders of the modern world two years back will keep its profile sufficiently high to fight off its mis-use, and promote its place in our documents, below the @ sign on our UK keyboards, and below the “ in the US. Long may it reign.