It’s only one mistake

JUNE CASAGRANDE

Pop quiz, hotshot: You’re a cop on the beat in Miami, where a group

of angry protesters has converged to raise Cain over trade talks. The

crowd gets out of hand, creating a potential danger. Do you a) tell

them they have to break it up, or b) tell them they all need to cough

up some cash?

I suspect that police chose the former. But on Nov. 22, The Los

Angeles Times reported that they did the latter. “Police seize

protesters after issuing warnings to disburse” read the caption under

the Associated Press photo.

See it? They printed “disburse,” meaning to pay out, instead of

“disperse,” to break it up.

I’d bet anything that the half-dozen or more people who had a

chance to catch that mistake all knew the difference. Yet none of

them caught it in time.

I love it when the big boys goof -- not because it makes me feel

superior, but because it, in this case, softens the blow for a rather

humiliating confession.

Months ago, a very nice reader sent me a column by language

columnist James Kilpatrick on the use of the word “only.” I read the

column with a sense of horror. Kilpatrick was talking about misuse of

the word “only” -- a grammar mistake I have been making all along

without realizing it.

Consider this: I only go to the movies on Saturdays. Most of us

use this to say that Saturday is the only day I go to the movies.

Unfortunately (sigh), that’s not what it means. What I really just

wrote is that I don’t do anything on Saturdays except go to the

movies. Nothin’. Nada.

My horror was followed by a sigh of relief. I received the

Kilpatrick column before I had had a chance to embarrass myself in

print. For at least a month or two, I made a careful effort to

remember this newfound lesson. Then, last week, I got a note from a

different reader pointing out that I had made this very mistake.

When a proper name ends with the letter S, “only add an

apostrophe,” I wrote. Meaning, don’t write another word, don’t

breathe, don’t do anything else again as long as you live except add

an apostrophe. After that, your life is pretty much over.

I was trying to make clear that you shouldn’t add the apostrophe

and another S. The apostrophe alone will do.

What I should have written, obviously, is “add only an

apostrophe.”

It gets worse.

The reader who busted me on this mistake is the same one I made

fun of in another column, dismissing him as someone whose grammar

obsession qualified him as “a little scary.”

To him and to anyone else who might hold this against me, all I

can say is that your dispersement is in the mail.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE covers Newport Beach and John Wayne Airport. She

may be reached at (949) 574-4232 or by e-mail at

[email protected].