Crimes of Illiteracy

Consistency and agreement is an important things

including

This is perhaps the most-abused English word. The best example comes from a commercial for a type of medicine: "Lipitor is not for everyone, including people with liver problems."

That's always struck me as inconsistent. I don't have a problem with using the singular "everyone" with the plural "people," but the absence of "everyone" certainly can't "include" anything. Usually "especially" is a better word in these cases.

the New Jersey Transit "passenger" problem

New Jersey Transit (the commuter-train service that runs between New York and New Jersey on a schedule that bears little resemblance to the one the company publishes) has many problems, the worst of which isn't grammatical. But a sentence on one sign on the trains always catches my eye: "When passengers do not cooperate with the conductor regarding payment of fares and conduct on the train, the police will be summoned and the passenger will be removed from the train at the next station stop."

So at the beginning of the sentence we're talking about passengers, and by the end of the sentence we're down to one passenger. Exactly who is this passenger we're talking about? The sentence needs to be all-plural or all-singular ("When a passenger..." would be a better way to begin).

(It also took me a long time to figure out why it was "station stop" and not just "station" or "stop." Well, "station" is insufficient because the express trains bypass some stations, and thus the train won't necessarily stop at the next station. And "stop" is insufficient because the train usually stops interminably between stations.)

"The" under T, "A" under A

Visitors to my home are shocked to see that my CD of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum gets alphabetized under A and that The Secret Garden goes under T.

The reason has to do with the inconsistency in alphabetization found in every record store. They all put The Secret Garden under S, but they put Les Misérables under L. I say, if the articles are going to be ignored, they should all be ignored, so Les Misérables should go under M. But my solution at home is to treat all letters equally - if a title starts with an article, it gets alphabetized based on the article.

I haven't yet figured out what to do with recordings of the same show in several languages, though. Blood Brothers goes under B, but should the Dutch version - Geboren Vrienden - go under G? For now, I'm putting all recordings of a show together, alphabetized according to the title in the language of the first recording of the show.