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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Criminal Sentence 329: Holmes Detects a Spelling Error

I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie this weekend (so-so), and was dismayed to see a spelling error in a headline of a newspaper in the movie. (Wow! That was a lot of prepositional phrases in a row!) Here's what it said:

"Sherlock Holmes Aides Police"

An "aide" is a person such as a nurse's aide or a political aide.
"To aid" is a verb: to help.

3 comments:

caerol said...

The Sherlock Holmes blunder is rectified with your terse explanation.

May I ask if you could do the same with the first sentence of this post? Is it alright to put a comma before "and," and does the comma means the succeeding words form a complete sentence?

The Sentence Sleuth said...

Sometimes commas separate two complete sentences as you suggest. Here the comma is optional. I guess I felt a short pause was in order. It would be fine to leave it out.
Also, it's supposed to be "all right" instead of alright.

Anonymous said...

I love watching you go back and forth correcting each other. It's by far the most entertaining way for me to improve my grammar.