As somebody who occasionally writes about the most common spelling and grammatical errors, it’s embarrassing when I make these kinds of mistakes myself. I had a near miss in my current Brainstorm e-bulletin. Before I proofed it, it contained this description of a medical innovation:
“An MRI set-up used for children decorated to look like an old fashioned ship.”
I guess that would look something like this:
Of course the problem is the crucial missing comma that separates the two elements, the set-up and the children:
“An MRI set-up used for children, decorated to look like an old-fashioned ship.”
That would look like this:
The most famous example of this error is Groucho Marx’s line: “Last night I dreamed I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What it was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.”
It would have been more clear this way: “Last night I dreamed I, in my pajamas, shot an elephant.”
But it wouldn’t have been funny.
