Thank you

 I would like to thank the faithful and brave among you who come here to read and leave your comments.  Oh yes! I like those  comments. And, if you would just stop to notice, I do respond.  They, the comments I mean, are very encouraging. They even make me feel that what I'm doing is worth while.   I welcome them. 

"Your" instead of "You're"

In  today's article, I will underscore one particular digression from the straight and narrow that I mentioned in Say What? and  which keeps coming back like a horrible nightmare.

Someone I know very well went to a function recently. It was the celebration of a birthday. Everything was going beautifully until the  cake appeared.  At that point she could not resist taking a picture even if it was just to prove to herself that what she was seeing was true. Here are the words on the birthday cake. Can you see the error?      


                                                                                                                                 "                               " Your"  instead of " You're"                 


I mentioned this example on page 68 of Say What? and, as I said there, "In some cases we think the right thing was said",  however, when we commit it to a page, then the error that was present all the time, jumps out at us. In this case, someone committed it to a cake. The cake probably looked great and I am sure it was delicious, too; but the extra effort  it  would have taken to communicate accurately was sorely missing.

The Impressionable Young Among Us

I'm wondering— and so should you— how many children saw this and believed it to be correct? We all know how easy it is for them to learn anything that is placed before them at this stage. Yet, we continually throw away opportunities to expose them to the correct thing.  Now, let's deal with what is wrong with the words here? I know you've seen it by now. Your How Old?
As my teenaged grand daughter and her mother would say: "Really?  Seriously?"


         Grand daughter & Daughter


And now the FIX

Wasn't it intended to be You're How Old? We will even ignore for a while the need for the correct sequence of words in the construction of a question, but we can neither ignore nor forgive the use of YOUR in place of YOU'RE. 

An Explanation

Your is one word — a possessive pronoun— and it is usually followed by a noun, the thing possessed. Example: This is your hat.  I love your smile.
You're is a contraction of two words: you and are.  We form the contraction by: 

• First putting the two whole words together:  You are 
• Dropping the a in are                                      You re
• Putting an apostrophe in that vacant space between  u and r, thereby making a new word, a contraction of the two—              You're.

And that's all there is to this great, big mystery.

"You're Welcome"  not  "Your welcome

In like manner, some people respond to someone saying "Thank you" with words that sound like the correct thing, which is "You're welcome". But ask them to write it, and here is what you'll get "Your welcome".   So let us correct this one also: Incorrect:  Your welcome.   Correct: You're welcome. 

Getting this right will only improve your communication skills. What an incentive!