Friday, March 6, 2009

Entitled to Title a Blog Entry

Lest we be thought of as perpetually grouchy, let us gently and helpfully point out a simple grammatical error that can be easily fixed by those paying attention.

Our email this morning contained an invitation to a conference call entitled (sic) “The Stimulus Plan and State and Local Government.”

It would be more correct to say “titled.”

Entitled speaks to one’s grounds for claiming something. For example, the IRS and Congress seem to think that they are entitled to a higher percentage of our earnings in the future.

Titled speaks to giving something a name. For example, Ann Coulter’s latest book is titled Guilty (with apologies to punctuation sticklers for italicizing both “titled” which we’re trying to stress and Guilty which, as a book title, should be italicized or underlined if italics aren’t available).

So there. A kind and productive suggestion. No vitriol. At least not yet for today.

One of our readers notes that he, too, is grouchy and has many more ideas. IdiotFlags welcomes your ideas for brief rants to help the rest of the world live a bit more correctly.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You rich people have been getting tax breaks since the beginning of time. Why not others?

Anonymous said...

You do realize that while the name of your blog is "Idiot Flags" (with a space between the two words), you used "IdiotFlags" (no space) in this post. I'm just saying. Which I think I'm entitled to do. Maybe you could get an earmark to pay for a proofreader.

Looking forward to more of your rants.