The notion that understanding the rule can save you from breaking it.

Language Log embarrasses The Wall Street Journal (European edition) by pointing at this headline which has 2 bad spelling errors:

"Prosector to Oscar Pistorius: 'You're Version's a Lie'"! 

(By the way, I think Language Log has a punctuation mistake there.)

Now, I think "Prosector" for "Prosecutor" is actually the worse mistake, because it got me thinking about what it would mean to be in favor of (i.e., pro) "sector." I thought of words like "bisect" and "dissect," which are based on a root that means to cut, and that sent me spinning into a contemplation of Pistorius's birth defect (fibular hemimelia) and the double amputation performed by the surgeons who could be said to be pro-sector.

But Language Log thinks the worse mistake is "You're" for "Your," even though that mistake — along with "it's" for "its" — is just about the most common typo there is. Language Log makes an amazing assertion:

What word frequently found in profusion in Obama's speeches is entirely absent from his Fort Hood speech?

I.

Also missing: me, my, mine.

I heard the criticism — from my husband Meade who is reading the speech alongside me — that the Fort Hood speech needed another draft, because there was too much use of the passive voice. I suspected that a special effort had been made to eliminate the first person singular. Obama is often criticized for using the word "I" too much. There are Obama critics who will count the word "I" in speeches and triumphantly announce the number. This criticism is a bit superficial. More significant is the way Obama speaks as if everything is all about him. Just this morning, I just knocked him for exactly that. Whoever wrote the Fort Hood speech must have been hyperfocused on protecting Obama from the usual criticisms. Appropriately so. It was a memorial for the dead. It would have been especially embarrassing for Obama's personal egotism to show on this occasion. But the intense effort to avoid it shows. He could afford to avoid it less conspicuously, and he ought to avoid it more consistently.

IN THE COMMENTS: With a fine eye for detail, Brian noted:

There was one self-referential moment. At Fort Hood he says: "You may remember the stories of a grandfather who marched across Europe..."

At 2004 Dem convention he said: "The day after Pearl Harbor my grandfather signed up for duty; joined Patton’s army, marched across Europe."

Ah! Truly, someone went over this speech very carefully to scrub it of the first-person singular.