It's a pet peeve of mine. I've seen letters to newspapers written by school teachers that are incorrect. Just match the subject of the sentence "tragedies" which is plural, to the verb form "are". Sorry to be so pedantic. Wish I could speak Spanish.
Agreed on the usage/grammar errors. I often wonder if the professional editors of the world attended the same schools as I. I find so many mistakes in newspapers, magazines, and internet articles that I begin to believe I could make a pretty decent living just going behind the editors already in place in an effort to correct the errors they missed.
"If someone hangs themself..."
1. "Themself" is not a word.
2. When using the reflexive pronoun, it must agree with the subject.
"If someone hangs himself..." (or herself)
Am I too picky? This drives me nuts!
Although this doesn't belong in this thread, I have to mention it... I've got a friend who always dreamed of becoming a school teacher. She LOVES kids and the english language. She got her BS in (I believe) english literature, and her masters in elementary education.
When she was teaching at her first assignment, the principal insisted that every teacher write letters to the parents along with the report cards, letting the parents know just how the children were doing, in addition to the letter grades.
My friend got calling into the principal's office a day or so later. As a new teacher, she was really nervous, and wondered what she had done wrong (for a new teacher, getting summoned to the principal's office isn't a good thing, just like when a kid gets sent there! lol)
Anyway, the principal wanted to know about her and her upbringing. My friend's letters were the only letters by teachers that the principal didn't have to correct! All the other teachers had written letters with spelling and grammatical errors, but Alyson's letters were perfect. It turned out that the principal was a former english teacher too, and she and Alyson became good friends.
Mark