Originally Posted by dcutcher
STILL when I see the "it's" vs "its"
mess that has proliferated in e-mail, newsgroups, electronic bulletin boards and elsewhere, but I'm gradually adjusting to the confusion.
What I can't bear to countenance is the "then/than" misuse in the writings of obviously otherwise well-informed appearing in FT. "Then" is an adverb; "than" is a conjunction, and ne'er the two shall meet.
I doubt a spell-checker is what's needed; I'd favor a grammar-checker if I knew of one friendly or efficient enough to consider...
My pet peeve is "loose" for "lose." However, the grammatical and related failings of FTers (seldom those of the poster, of course) have been beaten to death in a lot (not "alot") of other threads.
Trouble with spell checkers is, as has also been beaten to death in lots of places, is that they're (not "there," not "their") of no help at all (not "awl") when the mistake is a correctly spelled word, just not the one the poster meant to use (not "yews" or "ewes").
I could fill several pages with the mistakes my students hand in when they let Word not only catch their spelling errors but also decide how to fix them. A "multinational corporation with facilities in multiple lactations" comes to mind.
