Those misused words came back to bite me

It really hurts when you want to be right about something, so you turn to Google thinking you’re going to win a bet or an argument or prove a point and it turns out you were just dead wrong.

It can be anything. Is Burt Reynolds alive? Is it pronounced GIF or JIF? Why does my idiot friend insist that avocados are fruits?

On my recent vacation I, for some reason (it was the frozen cocktails), told a group of people gathered in the poolside hot tub that it’s a known fact that the push button was invented by General Electric.

I didn’t declare this fact randomly. We were talking about push buttons. The topic came up because the hot tub jets only ran for a few minutes at a time. Whoever or whomever was sitting closest to the button had to keep reaching over and pushing it to get the bubbles going again.

I don’t know why I thought it would be impressive for me to claim that GE invented the push button. I do know why. I had a few piña coladas and tossing out that “fact” felt impressive in the moment. I was being a big shot but chose a very odd, specific and fact-checkable thing to try to be a big shot about.

I have a friend who tries to be a big shot by lying and saying she dated Axl Rose back in the early ’80s. I have another friend who sometimes lies and says he was the Ontario Junior Curling Champion of 1978.

Why?

Well, back to the push button. One of my new vacation friends picked up on my hot air and said she was going to Google it.

Uh oh.

Well, she also had a few piña coladas, so I was sure she’d forget to fact check me.

She did not.

The next day, she told me she did a little research — however, fortunately-ish, the internet didn’t have a definitive answer to the push button question.

It proved me neither right nor wrong.

There was no grey area this week, though I got an email from an alert reader pointing out that in a column about misused and abused words and phrases, I was guilty of misusing and abusing a word or phrase.

I hate when that happens. Mary Ann wrote me a kind email but, sandwiched between compliments, she correctly called me out for using some odd language while writing about the idea of having a “Like Jar” similar to a swear jar. People would have to pay up if they were caught using the word “like.” I suggested including “Fair” and “100 per cent.”

I also had a suggestion from reader Marilyn to include “So.”

OK, so now we have a Like, Fair, 100 Per Cent and So Jar. That’s not the important thing here.

In the second-to-last sentence of the column, I wrote about the noxious words and said: “The young people love to drop those ones and I could make some coin if I charged them every time.”

“I cringed and my father rolled in his grave at your use of ‘those ones’ …” Mary Ann wrote. “I hope you did that on purpose just to bug us.”

I could lie to you, Mary Ann, but I did not use those ones intentionally.

I googled “those ones” and found the question, “Should You Say These Ones or Those Ones?”

Too bad for me, the answer is neither. I was wrong. Dang it.

Well, let’s use this as a learning opportunity. What I found out is that “these” and “those” are the plural forms of “this” and “that.” According to grammarbook.com, “this shoe” becomes “these shoes,” and “that flower” becomes “those flowers.”

What about “this one” and “that one?” Do they become “these ones” and, as I wrote, “those ones?”

Neither, says grammarbook.com. Just say “these” or “those.”

If that’s not good enough, don’t just use “ones.” Be clear and describe what the “ones” are.

If only I had written, “The young people love to drop those words,” then I wouldn’t have to be here this week confessing to the very word crimes I am trying to fight.