‘I Came to School with Churidar!’ | Right or Wrong? 💜

‘I Came to School with Churidar!’ 

Right or Wrong?

Today's New Indian Express

Common Errors in English Usage &

How to Avoid Them | Today’s Newspaper

#newspaperinlearning #commonerrorsinenglish #sentencecorrection #evenhomernods

The New Indian Express 

6th November 2023

Even Homer nods, goes the good ol’ adage!

Which means, even a poet as great as the legendary Homer, sometimes falls asleep, and hence prone to committing mistakes, due to a momentary lack of attention!

In short, even the most gifted person is prone to making mistakes or errors, at times!

This post hence, doesn’t seek to magnify common errors (yes, errors, NOT mistakes!) in the daily newspaper. However, this post wishes to just foreground a few of them, so that, we can be alert to such errors while writing!

So here goes –

Sample a news report featured in today’s Chennai Edition of The New Indian Express, to help us all – [teachers and students of English language and literature], be a bit more careful in our usage of the language.

Consider these two sentences, from this news report.

“I wore churidar to school and felt comfortable.”

In this above sentence,

“I wore churidar to school” could mean –

To the school where I am working / studying.

On the other hand,

I wore churidar to the school could mean –

The school where I went to visit a friend/ a teacher, etc. I don’t study / work there.

Now I hope you’d be able to guess the error in the following sentence –

“Earlier, colleagues used to tease me using double entendres when I wore saree to the office and I scolded them”.

The correct way of writing this sentence would be –

“Earlier, colleagues used to tease me using double entendres when I wore saree to office and I scolded them”.

Now, let us consider two more sentences (again from the same news report!)

“Due to continuous dispute with him, I have started coming to school in saree again and face the same problem.”

In the above sentence, in saree could mean –

I have started coming to school wearing saree, or dressed in saree.

On the other hand,

“I have been going to the office with churidar for the last two years”, could mean –

I have been going to the office carrying a churidar in my hand for the last two years. 😊

The two sentences then, are, as different as chalk and cheese, ain’t they? 😊