Friday Fricassee

It's been a busy week around here! Thanks, everyone, for your participation in our first logline critique session (and another huzzah for Holly Bodger, who is not only the icing on the cake, but also the meat in the stew!).

In the spirit of all-things-wordy, I bring you this tale of my knee-jerk response to a grammatical error.  In an email.  From a local business.  In a large font.  It said:

YOUR INVITED.

(I made that bigger to give you the full effect of the HORROR AND SHAME.)

It was an invitation to an open house with drawings and sale prices and all sorts of local goodness.  But I couldn't get past the error.

So I snapped.  I hit "reply" and said:

Sounds lovely!

At the risk of being "that" person -- it's YOU'RE INVITED.  Not "your invited".  YOU'RE = contraction for "you are".  (Yes, I'm a writer and editor.)

FWIW.  

Then I brushed imaginary dust from my hands and figured I'd be de-listed at best, eternally hated at worst.  Because, yanno, who likes a grammar know-it-all?

Imagine my surprise when, the next morning, I received the following:

We could use a good writer.... What are you doing in your spare time? 

I wish I had gotten your correction before I sent this out to all our customers.

I bet they will get the meaning and hopefully look past my mistake.

Maybe you will get to come by sometime in October! Thanks for keeping us on our toes.

There you have it: THERE IS HOPE FOR HUMANITY.  (Well, that, or I was lucky to come across one extremely tolerant and diplomatic person who may have had experience with apostrophe vigilantes in the past.)

At any rate, I feel like maybe this was a teachable moment.  As in, next time she wants to invite the masses to her store, she will remember our conversation and avoid the grammatical error.  Who knows?  She may go on to TELL OTHERS.

I may have started a local YOUR/YOU'RE revolution!

Well.  Probably not.  But it surely does feel good to not be hated.

Happy weekend!