I happened to follow a link to Microsoft’s nearly useless MSN Groups site the other day and was horrified to see that the specter of a slogan that I believed had long since died an obscure death was still with us, at least in the “page title” information that’s displayed at the top of your browser. Yes, one of the most egregious taglines in recent corporate marketing history still survives, the MSN slogan: “More Useful Everyday.”

Aside from the tepid, vacuous, banal (and likely erroneous) claim itself, is that an adjective masquerading as an adverbial phrase I see? Quel horreur, it is!—and when I first ran into this piece of stupidity a few years ago, I wasted no time in dashing off a seething, skewering Word Nazi missive to the powers that be at Microsoft, including Mr. Gates himself, as well as to Microsoft’s advertising agency of record, whom I assumed were guilty of perpetrating this travesty. It might not surprise you to know that I received no response, not even a “thank you for your interest in Microsoft products” note. And it won’t surprise you at all (since the evidence is before you) to see that they did nothing at all about correcting it.

I’m sure that there are some of you reading this even now who don’t fully grasp the concept of this error, much less its magnitude—and why should you, when you are attacked “every day” by the Microsofts of the world and their billion-dollar advertising budgets. To clarify, “everyday” is an adjective, and as we recall from some boring elementary-school English class, adjectives modify nouns. They don’t ever answer questions like “when?” or “how often?”—which are the exclusive purview of adverbs and their more verbose cousins, adverbial phrases. (Speaking of elementary school, does anyone remember when this was called “grammar school”? Somewhere deep in his black soul, The Word Nazi believes that this change in nomenclature, from “grammar school” to “elementary school,” was the very start of the slippery slope that landed us where we are today—adrift in a sea of grammatical ignorance. After all, you’re basically saying, “Enough prattle about this grammar stuff; that’s too hard anyway. From now on we’re just focusing on things that are elementary.” And once you make that intellectual shift, dear reader, it’s all downhill from there.)

But I digress. The point is, the slogan breaks down like this: First, “[MSN is] more useful.” Then, “When (or how often) is it more useful?” (Well, we’ll need an adverb to answer a question like that, won’t we?) And so the answer is, “Why, every day, of course!” Note that. “Every day,” not “everyday.” Everyday is an adjective that modifies nouns like “clothes” or “demeanor,” as in, “His everyday clothes and everyday demeanor belie the fact that Warren Buffet is the richest man in the United States.” (Hey, if I can get in a clean shot at Bill Gates while teaching a grammar lesson, I’m taking it.) Everyday means “common, ordinary, encountered routinely or typically.” Every day means “happening or occurring every day, daily.” The first is always an adjective, and the second is always (always!) an adverb.

Of course, there is a word that can serve as both adverb and adjective and carry both meanings, and that word is daily. In the phrase, “My daily ablutions,” daily is an adjective that modifies that fancy word for washing oneself. But in the phrase, “I carry out my ablutions daily,” now it’s an adverb specifying when or how often you carry them out. So why couldn’t Microsoft just say, “More useful daily,” and be done with it? Well, disregarding the fact that this version sounds even more boring than the original, here we encounter a finer point of sense and connotation. “I get better every day” implies a sort of continuous improvement from one day to the next, while, “I get better daily” subtly connotes the possibility that you might get better, and then worse, and then better, from day to day.

Now, I’m sure I wasn’t the only grammarian to send Microsoft a strongly worded note about this egregious corruption of such a humble and inoffensive adjective. The fact that they took no action to rectify the error or to mollify me tells me that either (a) they still didn’t understand, despite lengthy attempts at explanation, or (b) they just didn’t care. I guess you will have to decide that one for yourself. But in the meantime, there’s no reason that you should commit the same mistake as Microsoft, right? So just remember the sentence, “He wore his everyday clothes every day,” and you’ll be sure to get it right—every day.