I just saw this in the user interface for Microsoft Word:
“Word found 36 items matching this criteria.”
This criteria. In a product that is supposedly created by professional writers for professional communication. Interestingly, when running the above sentence through Word’s own grammar checker, the sentence is flagged. Use these criteria or this criterion, the software advises.
This isn’t the latest version of Word, so there’s a chance it has been addressed. But still, this doesn’t reflect well on the Quality Assurance team at Microsoft.
Incidentally, my sweetie and I discovered this while comparing to see who had the most f-bombs in their story. It’s been one of those years. (It would be premature to declare a winner, as she will be adding a lot more words over the next three days.)
I give this article as a handout every year to my Essay Writing students as they are putting their portfolios together and doing the final edits on them. I found it rather ironic that this guy is in Seattle, Microsoft Central. If you go to the links related to this article, you can see examples of utterly ludicrous warped prose that MS Word thought were perfectly acceptable.
http://www.seattlepi.com/business/217802_grammar28.asp
Yet in this case, Microsoft Word would have caught the bad grammar in Microsoft Word.
Remember this is Microsoft, so recite to yourself thirteen times:
It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.