Thursday 12 April 2012

Shakespeare IV Grammarcheck

There was no prize for spotting April's deliberate mistake, just checking to see if everyone was paying attention. Of course, as several people have pointed out, if Shakespeare had used Grammarcheck programs - no apostrophe please! What was that, a pedantic greengrocers you know what because it's short for programmes? - "bones are coral made" would probably go unchecked as they would parse bones as the subject of are, whereas we know that Shakespeare was probably using coral as an unmarked plural. Or he just didn't care because it sounded better. Or some actor copied it down wrong or misremembered it.

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