Malapropisms are like candy to terrorists

It pains me to say it, but I have something in common with our executive branch in that I'm very, very disappointed in the New York Times for its careless printing of material that threatens some of our most fundamental societal securities.

Not for disclosing "secret" international bank-monitoring programs the officials themselves held press conferences touting earlier in the "war on terror," but for this sentence, which appeared near the end of one of the most-emailed articles over the weekend, a piece on an airfare price-predicting Web site:

If Farecast tells you that fares are going to go down, it would be smart to check everyday until Farecast changes its advice to buy.

If you see nothing wrong with that sentence, look again. If you still see nothing wrong, you are a horrible person who is perpetuating wanton dictional assault, for which I hope you are thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

You see, anyone who's dabbled in copy editing has his or her grammatical and stylistic pet peeves (like how the English language lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun, for instance)–those small yet grating errors that abound in popular prose that no one else seems to realize are, in fact, errors.

Mine is the use of "everyday" where "every day" is correct (and the rare and elusive but doubly god-awful vice versa).

To clear up this madness once and for all: "Everyday" is an adjective. You know, those words that precede and describe other words, like "crunchy" or "loquacious." It means common, ordinary, usual, run-of-the-mill. "Every day" means, literally, each day.

In sum, if the New York Times were to print such error-riddled drivel every day, the English language would surely suffer as a respected and widely disseminated news source compounds the everyday scourge of poor grammar.

See, it ain't that hard, kiddies. Next time, somebody gets flogged–because freedom dies, just a little, each time you unnaturally merge your syntactical units.