Check for blind spots

The Checklist Manifesto contends that using a checklist for any task helps to avoid overlooking details. Kathryn Schultz sees a problem with those checklists because they need to be kept short to make them useable, and “omissions can have grave consequences.” Leaving out items that “are deemed either too routine or too rare to merit inclusion,” leads to a “phenomenon known as inattentional blindness: when you ask people to look for something specific, they develop a startling inability to see things …that would normally be glaringly obvious” (Huffington Post 4/1/10).
Wouldn’t we know that he did it on purpose just to be expelled from West Point, we could assume that it was this blindness that caused Edgar Allen Poe to attend a parade where gloves and a belt explicitly were required. He showed up wearing those two accessories – but nothing else.
Yet, a checklist can be a good thing, for example when deciding whether to purchase a cartridge coffee maker or a drip coffee maker. The cartridge machine may come out the winner because it has one decisive advantage: it helps to avoid “making a pot, most of which will be thrown out” (Sam Allis/Boston.com 3/8/10). Normally glaringly obvious that no method of brewing coffee requires to discard parts of the pot, a writer’s inattentional blindness may make him indeed throw out the pot with the coffee - or the music with the money. “The only lessons I had as a child were piano lessons, and believe me, the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years was a musical calamity” (Michael Winerip/NYT 3/28).
While money certainly isn’t a musical dilemma, Congress’s modus operandi apparently is a political one. “It is an ugly process. It was ugly when Republicans were in charge, it was ugly when Democrats were in charge” (B. Obama/Fox News 3/17/10). Was it attentional or inattentional blindness which made the speaker not see that Democrats still are in charge? Yet, according to David Brooks, Democrats prefer anyway to be remembered for their glorious past, a time when they “protected the unemployed starting with the New Deal, then the old, then the poor” (NYT 3/21/10). And what came (ro comes?) after the poor deal?

Always check the antecedent: an antecedent is an expression (usually a noun or noun phrase) to which another expression (an anaphor) refers. The relationship between noun and anaphor must be absolutely clear. Sentences in which this relationship is strained, avenge themselves on a writer's inattention by twisting his or her intention.

Missing antecedent: “...making a pot, most of which will be thrown out:” the pronoun which grammatically refers to pot instead of the correct but missing antecedent coffee. ..."making a pot of coffee, most of which will be thrown out."
Intervening antecedent: “The only lessons I had as a child were piano lessons, and believe me, the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years was a musical calamity:” The writer probably did not want to say that the $3 were a musical calamity, rather that the lessons were. Yet the three dollars are the closest subject of the verb was to which the subject complement musical calamity can refer, and thus three dollars usurps the role of antecedent. To avoid such unclear references, the proper antecedent must be repeated and the sentence slightly changed. "... and believe me, despite the $3 my determined mother forked over to Mrs. Donohue every Saturday morning for two years, those piano lessons were a musical calamity.")
Ambiguous antecedent: They “protected the unemployed starting with the New Deal, then the old, then the poor:” Even though we can assume (based on the use of lower case versus capitals) that the old and the poor are a continuation of the list that began with the unemployed, the placement of these two items suggests that the adjectives old and poor modify the immediately preceding deal. To avoid ambiguity, the sentence needs rephrasing. "Starting with the New Deal, they protected the unemployed, then the old, then the poor."

Woe is me

"The president has been roundly criticized by bloggers for using 'I' instead of 'me' in phrases like 'a very personal decision for Michelle and I'" Patricia O’Conner points out and explains that "The rule here, according to conventional wisdom, is that we use 'I' as a subject and 'me' as an object."
David Brooks, a staunch admirer of Obama's eloquence, may have heard this criticism and decided to avoid I "even when it's right. The term for this linguistic phenomenon is 'hypercorrection’" (O'Connor).

I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he [Obama] knew both better than me (“The Courtship” ).

In fact, senators do not know a policy area better than him/Mr. Brooks; rather they know it better than he/Mr. Brooks does. Just as well, Barack Obama may know both, politics and political philosophy, better than David Brooks does, but he does not know them better than he knows him. Thus, every "me" in the quote above should have been an "I:" "while they may know a policy area better than I do, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than I. I got the sense he [Obama] knew both better than I do.”

Since "an educated speaker is expected to keep his pronouns in line" (O’Connor), Obama and Brooks should maybe do some woe-is-meing together, a new shtick and the modern adaptation of "woe is me," "meaning to express sorrow and misfortune to others. Glorified moaning, perhaps" (urban dictionary).

WHY?
He (subject) knows (verb) me (object)

He (subject) knows (verb) Bill (first object) better than me (second object) = a comparison of someone’s knowledge of two different objects (Bill and me).

He (subject) knows (verb) Bill (object) better than I (subject) do (verb) = a comparison of different people’s (he and I) knowledge of the same object (Bill). Sentences like this are often incorrectly shortened by omitting the second verb (do): He knows Bill better than I.

The Dos and Don'ts

Style manuals disagree on the use of –‘s for plurals of so-called non-noun words. Some allow the apostrophe to avoid ambiguity as in the headline “The I's Have It.” The apostrophe seems necessary to clearly convey the article's topic, the use of the personal pronoun I. Without an apostrophe, the heading would read “The Is have It” and would be ambiguous, unless the author had decided to use lower case for the heading ("the Is have it) and thus avoided the dilemma.
But what about the plural of do and don’t? “For an inexperienced player, a golf putt can seem like an endless checklist of do's and don'ts” ("The Superstar effect"). If the apostrophe is used in do’s to indicate the plural of do, then the plural of don’t would logically be don’t’s and not don'ts.
Ben Zimmer in the NYT recently used noes as the plural of no, adding the e probably to follow the examples of tomatoes, potatoes and heroes. Applying this rule to do, would suggest to form the plural as does, which doesn’t work because does would be mistaken as a verb, the 3rd person singular of to do.
Although Zimmer in the same article uses the word yes repeatedly, he never does so in the plural. Similar to nouns such as lens/lenses, however, the plural of yes, indeed needs an additional e to make the yeses audible.
Which leaves us with the wheres and hows of doing something, the buts and sorrys (or sorries?) about having done something not quite satisfactorily, and the whos (or whoes?) we don't know by name. Using apostrophes is not recommendable since who's, how's or where's are the contractions of who is, how is or where is.
So, using non-noun words in the plural obviously creates quite a mess. Moreover, since –’s is used to indicate the possessive of a noun, it creates confusion if we also use it to form a word’s plural. Yet, since we pluralize numbers such as hundreds and dozens and compounds like stand-bys and close-ups by simply adding an s, the same rule could also apply to dos and don’ts, to nos and yeses, to whos and whats, and to the maybes we might raise regarding this whole issue or to the sorrys for having to use those non-noun words in the first place.

According to MLA, apostrophes are not permissible for plurals of numbers, acronyms, and abbreviations

*The roaring 1920s (compared to 2010’s best movies)
*The three sevens in a phone number.
*MAs (compared to a PhD’s advantages)
*CDs (compared to a PC’s hard drive)
*YMCAs (compared to the YMCA’s rules for membership)

Exceptions are

*Letters of the alphabet referred to as the letters themselves with the letter italicized but not the 's (Mind your p’s and q’s!)
*Words that are referred to as the word itself with the word italicized but not the 's (All his our’s and are’s are misspelled.)