Stat of the day

than…
- As a non-native speaker of english, I can't get my head around this grammatical mistake. Than and then are completely different!
  
  This is a common mistake for many native English speakers and highlights the different challenges in speaking a language and writing a language.
  In many regions of the US for example, “than” and “then” are often pronounced exactly the same.
  
  native speakers make spelling errors more often than non native speakers because they learn to speak the language way before learning to spell, which means homophones can easily register as the same word in your mind for years before you even encounter the words in writing. having to unlearn things is usually harder than just learning it in the first place.
  
  I've noticed over the years I never used to make the mistake, but the better my proficiency, the more I started making the mistake. I think when you start running on autopilot mistakes like that are made more often
- I like to believe that it's a like a news headline "More Americans have died of ebola after marrying Kim Kardashian"
- Nah, just missing an ,
  
  Nah, just missing an a ,
  FTFY

Why did they die of ebola after marriage?
- How would they get married after dying of Ebola?
  
  Now there’s no need to kink shame.
  
  Oh, so ghosts can't get married now?!
- Incubation period, I suppose.

On a sidenote, after Republicans panicked over an Ebola outbreak in the USA then President Obama followed strict procedures to contain the outbreak and created an Pandemic Playbook for future presidents to use as guidelines. You know the rest.
- Also worth pointing out that Obama was following the example of W. It was their guy that originally started the project. Obama was just logically expanding it to include the rest of the world, because that's how pandemics work.
  
  And the Guy's name was Fauci, who Trump hates so much that Biden is preemptively pardoning him.
- My wife was caught up in that Ebola scare, because she was on the same plane that the nurse (who had been treating Ebola patients and knew she had been exposed) flew in on. The feds came knocking on her door, and basically said that if anyone in the household left the house, they would immediately go to prison. They put ankle monitors on everyone in the household, and security tape across all the doors and windows so none could be opened without visibly breaking the tape. The CDC called every hour or so to do mandatory temperature checks, and they had to talk to every person in the household to make sure everyone was still present.
  Apparently she almost got fired over it, because her manager initially didn’t believe her. She tried to pull the typical “if you’re sick you need to find someone to cover your shifts. If you can’t find anyone, you need to come in” BS that is rampant in retail. It wasn’t until my wife had the feds call her manager and basically tell her “she’s 100% under quarantine, and if you encourage her to break it we’ll haul your ass in front of a judge” that the manager relented.