Everyone has at least one. Here’s mine: the distinction between conscious (being alert, awake and oriented) and conscience (one’s moral compass) has really broken down in popular usage. Case in point:
I was reminded that I had taken this picture in Target when Erik Loomis of all people made the same mistake.
I realize it’s not then end of the world, but for some reason this one really bugs me. I think autocorrect and/or voice recognition might be part of the problem because it reinforces bad usage when texting. Anyway, share your biggest grammar peeve or anything else in this open thread.
sab
I am horrified but intrigued by the idea of concious diapers. Maybe it’s not so bad for them. Blowfly larva and tardigrades eat icky stuff.
Old Man Shadow
You’re doing those conscious diapers a favor. In their previous life, they were people who deserved to be shit upon. Buying them now for your baby will help them balance the karmic scale of justice.
Butch
One of my jobs is as technical editor for reports that involve mostly hazardous waste cleanup or archeology. You don’t want to get me started.
Brant
I despise when people use adjectives ss adverbs. It grates on my ears, to a degree that I can’t explain. And we don’t teach grammar in schools, anymore.
JPL
It’s the woke culture.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Maybe it’s an AI thing and they really are sentient?
sacrablue
Conscience vs concious has always been at the top of my list along with subconcious vs unconcious. The other that makes me grind my teeth is supposedly vs supposably.
jeffreyw
very unique, most unique, [any fucking modifier] unique
The Moar You Know
#1: greengrocer’s apostrophe. I have plenty of others but this is the one that REALLY gets under my skin.
Basilisc
Two of them that have become so universal I’ve almost given up grumbling:
“lead”, presumably pronounced like the metal, as the past tense of “lead”. Yeah, it’s silly that “read” (rhymes with “red”) is the past tense of “read”, but both “lead/led” and “read/read” are standard English, sorry.
“woah” instead of “whoa”. I guess it was originally just a transcription of something horse-riders shouted, so I can’t really complain about the spelling. But I will complain, because to me “woah” says, “I am not very literate”.
And get off my lawn.
SiubhanDuinne
One that’s recently made a comeback: Mixing up “flout” and “flaunt.”
TheronWare
The product will have to be recalled due to bad grammar!
NeenerNeener
“Taken for granite” really bugs me. The first time I saw this misuse was on a corporate memo about 45 years ago. It wasn’t the last time, unfortunately.
Ken
I’m trying to imagine the overlap. “The Etruscan temple site is a category 5 biohazard due to the plague pit…”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Speaking of conscience, I’m kind of wrestling with mine right now.
A friend died over the summer. We are musical friends, sang together in a chorus which has been suspended since March 2020. His memorial service is this Saturday, and one of his wishes according to the pastor was that his musical friends sing at his service. I’ve done these things before, joining in the memorial service choir for a musician, and it’s really a beautiful thing.
But the idea of joining a crowded church service, let alone singing in a choir, is just unbearable. We’ve been so careful and so isolated. And we have the further excuse of my wife’s cancer treatment (though in truth as she has not yet started radiation — that’s another story — opinion is divided as to whether she is truly immuno-compromised).
But that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that I am just not prepared to either go back to church or sing in a group yet. But I keep thinking, every day, that I should. Ultimately I think I’m not going to. I’m so sorry, Frank.
cmorenc
on my list are people who write long streaming sentences with you know no punctuation paragraph and they don’t know where to properly place commas runs shoots and leaves etc dont you just hate that i do and i run into it ALL the time most annoying isn’t it i can’t stand to read their gibberish can you, as if i have time to figure out what they’re trying to say but usually i don’t because it isn’t worth it wouldnt you agree they clutter up and won’t shut up.
Taken4Granite
Part of my work involves reading technical reports written by people who are not native English speakers, so I have to have some tolerance for mistakes in grammar and usage as long as the authors’ meaning is clear. Unfortunately, native English speakers are not immune from certain boneheaded grammar mistakes like dangling participles.
Benw
@Butch: I bet you see a lot of inflammable grammar errors.
narya
All of the above, plus not knowing when to use “that” or “which.” Its/it’s sends me into a rage–do people not remember how contractions work?
Mornington Crescent
When I saw that photo, I literally exploded with laughter.
Scout211
Maybe it was because we often suspected our mother was the grammar police, but I have a strong reaction when I read (in mass market paperbacks and in some online news stories) “I was smarter than her.” “I liked him better than him.” “This is her.” “This is him.” Unfortunately (or fortunately) our language seems to be changing and it seems to be more acceptable now. I read it in many, many mass market fiction books and I cringe every time.
Back in the day, when all we had were landline phones, my mother was very strict about how we answered the phone. You must say, “This is she.” Never, ever, ever say, “This is her.”
Hoodie
Autocorrect may be part of the problem, but with me it also seems to be some sort of glitch in eye-to-hand correlation while typing, i.e., I know what I want to spell, but my fingers have other ideas.
Taken4Granite
@NeenerNeener: My nym is based on that phrasing in part because I live in New Hampshire, a.k.a. the Granite State. Around here that is an obvious pun to make. But yeah, unless you are referring to the state or the rock, it’s the wrong thing to use.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Old Man Shadow:
“[. . .] deserved to be
shitshat upon.”I mourn the disappearance of the past tense.
In similar fashion—and I blame this somewhat on voice-to-text—the past tense led is losing ground. Even in news stories now you see things like “X happened, and this lead to Y.”
Also fading: sank, shrank, stank, etc.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I assume that’s the use of apostrophes for plurals? “All mens shoe’s on sale this week!”
I never heard it attributed specifically to greengrocers. Or greengrocer’s.
“Loose/lose” is one that gets to me. I just don’t understand how you confuse those.
Ken
Obviously an example of the wine-whine merger.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Less for fewer. Also, why the fuck am I the only person alive who still says throve and thriven? Shit…
Central Planning
Using ask as a noun: “What is the ask?”
And irregardless.
narya
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I’m so sorry. Perhaps a small group of you can meet outside, masked, and add another chorus? Would that be okay with you, and would that enable you to participate in a send-off? (I’ve seen masks for singers–kind of duck-bill-shaped, were being made by Broadway costumers.)
montanareddog
Sorry because it is a flaw prevalent among a few jackals here but “I could care less” punches my buttons. It is “I could not care less”, my friends. I could care less means that you care, at least a little bit, because you care greater than zero.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
I assume the general category is “people who discover something unexpected when digging”. There are strict legal requirements about what to do in either case. I would guess unexpected paleontological discoveries would fall in the same category.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Basilisc:
Amen on both. To me “woah” says, “I am on line [I hate ‘online’] and not very literate.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
This isn’t exactly a grammar error, but I flinch every time I see “gift” used as a verb. I can’t seem to get used to it.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Don’t go. Perhaps pledge to yourself that at some safe time in the future you will visit his grave and sing for him then.
feebog
“Tow the line”. Arrrrgh!!!!
Baud
Now I’m going to be wondering about diapers that are not cruelty free.
Gravenstone
@Taken4Granite: Oh lord, flashback time. Years ago we had a Polish scientist here. Quite accomplished and rather a prickly personality. He wrote up a procedure for our lab group to make one of his new products and I had to review it before it hit the floor. I made absolutely zero changes to the substance of the process, simply cleaned up the verbiage to make it actual functional English (one of his several secondary languages) for our operators to use. Routed it back to the scientist for his comment. The next time I see it, it’s back in its original mangled form because the bastard had ripped out every single change I made. So yeah, I’m prepared to make allowances, but I also have to be allowed to make changes where needed.
S. Cerevisiae
Conscious diapers are horrifying but I can think of a bunch of people who should be reincarnated as them.
NeenerNeener
@Taken4Granite: your nym makes me giggle because I know it’s in jest.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I wonder if that came from Spanish, which does have a special word for “gift” as a verb.
sab
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Think of it as tax law jargon and then move on. Syntax was never improved by CPAs getting anywhere near our language.
Old Man Shadow
@Roger Moore: “So…you were digging a new sewer line and you’ve discovered an ancient pre-historical civilization of cannibalistic Elder god cultists… I can’t tell you how often this happens.”
WV Blondie
“Rein” vs. “reign,” especially over the past five years as the shatstorm broke. WaPo is particularly bad.
Hungry Joe
Not grammar, but OT, right?
Why do news anchors have to thank reporters and guests for the segments they appear on/contribute to? “That was Joe Schmendrick in Smellville. Thanks, Joe.” Joe responds with “Thank YOU” or “My pleasure.” Every time. And every time, I mentally edit out the final call and response. And every time the report loses nothing but four seconds.
Also, George Frayne, aka Commander Cody, has died at 77. Western swing, boogie-woogie, rockabilly. Saw him & his Lost Planet Airmen many times, and oh my, they were fun. And GOOD. Never disappointed.
Gravenstone
I sadly conclude that we’ve already lost the argument on those two. Their abuse is rife, even here amongst the Jackaltariat.
Roger Moore
My personal pet peeve with grammar is people who use infer to mean imply. For whatever reason, it’s never the opposite. My non-grammar pet peeve is people who use “martini” to refer to anything that is not based on gin and vermouth. A proper martini contains gin and vermouth, with optional ice and garnish. If you have anything else call it something else.
Mousebumples
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I know it won’t be the same thing, but could you sing to him, on your own, as a way of remembering him? I’m guessing you haven’t given up singing during covid, though I understand the reluctance to sing in public, in a group.
May his memory be a blessing, all the same.
On the thread topic – I love the Oxford comma. But comma misuage, in general, drives me crazy.
Steve
There’s no such thing as “preventative”
It’s Preventive
quakerinabasement
Grammar pet peeve? Effect/affect.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@narya: It’s a nice thought but it’s someone else’s church and it would feel way out of line to organize what feels like a protest service outside the church.
It’s notable that the choir director is staying silent on participating, she merely passed along the pastor’s message. Nor has she said anything about resuming rehearsals, although she did take a survey late in the summer about how people felt about resuming. My guess is that she got a lot of negative response. There is a large contingent of over-70s in this group.
sab
@feebog: I did that just last week, caught it in “edit” after I posted, but too late. NotMax had caught it, plus another typo.
montanareddog
@Gravenstone: confusing loathe and loath/loth is common too
ETA: and like loose/lose, they are not even homophones
smith
I’m an Old who went to school Back When People Learned Proper English, but I’ve reluctantly given up on getting into a lather over the loss of lead/led, or the verbs “to lie” vs “to lay.” I have bid a sad farewell to the subjunctive mood, and even have come to overlook all the people who can’t distinguish to/too/two, or their/there/they’re. But, my god, can’t people even use pronouns correctly any more? “Him and me are going downtown. ” “They gave the tickets to my sister and I.” I’m seeing this kind of pronoun abuse more and more even in supposedly professional writing. To my elderly ears, everyone sounds like they dropped out of school in seventh grade.
Lacuna Synecdoche
mistermix @ Top:
– Ambiguous pronouns (referent ambiguous, not gender ambiguous).
– Using loose for lose, and looser for loser.
Butch
@Ken: I’m a subcontractor for several different companies; the reports are grisly in their very own unique ways.
RSA
@Scout211:
Yeah, that’s me. Oops, sorry! That is I. Or maybe That am I? I don’t even know.
SiubhanDuinne
@narya:
Even worse is when they write something like do’nt or shoul’dnt. They know there’s an apostrophe but can’t be arsed to figure out where it belongs so just shove it in any old where.
And I’ve fussed about this previously, at the risk of offending several beloved FPs and commenters who regularly use it, but I cringe every time I see (or hear) “anywho” or “anyhoo.”
opiejeanne
@The Moar You Know: When I can reach them, I use my thumb to erase the errant apostrophe on signboards offering vegetable’s, or even vegetables’.
One gripe I’ve had for the past 15 years is the dropping of “of” from sentences, as in “a couple apples.” It makes me grit my teeth.
cokane
So many, but just one for now: Amoral.
It doesn’t mean “really really immoral”. In fact, it should almost never be applied to a person. And it’s important to have a word that means what amoral truly means.
kmeyerthelurker
@montanareddog: Beat me to it. I’ve always hated that one.
rmjohnston
People go with “who” or whom,” not “that” or “which.” And speaking of “that” and “which,” use them correctly!
If you’re describing an object or objects, use a comma followed by which. If you’re defining a class of objects – the class may include only one object – use “that” without a comma.
“Springfield, which is a fictional town that the Simpsons live in, is a truly fucked up place.
If you can ask the question “Which sprockets are these?” then the answer is “These are the sprockets that we bought from Spacely Sprockets.”
Leto
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I’m sorry for your loss. I’ll echo what Steeplejack said: do it in the future. Maybe go to your friend’s grave site and sing something that you both sang in choir? It’ll honor his memory/request and hopefully give you some closure.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I’m really sorry that you lost your friend.
germy
Hilfy
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):” Less for fewer” and the accompanying “amount of people”. Or “amount” of anything that is individuals, not bulk goods to be weighed. Thought I was the only one who was annoyed by this. I’m glad to know there is at least one other individual who remembers high school grammar class.
Gravenstone
Word actually grumbles at you when you pad sentences with “of” in that particular construction. It kindly suggests dropping it for the sake of concision.
Bill
People who say “disinterested” when they mean “uninterested”
SiubhanDuinne
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Me too. I mean, I also :-)
In a similar vein, and in my universe, “invite” is still a verb, not a noun.
opiejeanne
@Scout211:
When asked if my mother is home, I have been known to answer, “I am my mother.”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Bill: Don’t get me started on “bemused” or “penultimate”.
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack (phone): “He drug her out of the cellar.”
I heard a governor use “drug” when he meant “dragged”, although there were no women being dragged out of cellars in his statement.
germy
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
“Bemused” means “amused” now and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack (phone):
I’m personally find with any time when an irregular form is replaced by a regular one; I’m not so happy when an irregular form is replaced by a different irregular one.
Hungry Joe
@feebog: As a kid I thought it was “tow the line” because when I first heard it we had just read about the Erie Canal. I assumed the expression was associated with using a thick rope to pull a barge, and thus, cooperating … towing the line, all together. (Hey, I was nine.)
De-lurking just this once
“Should of” instead of “should have”. Drives me nuts.
Anoniminous
@Baud:
Gift comes from the proto-Germanic *gebaną ‘to give’ then *gebō which became ‘gifu’ in Old English.
Dredging memory, there was a whole cultural ‘thing’ about giving and gifting in Proto-Indo-european society that would be reflected in PIE based languages such as Spanish.
opiejeanne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: How about the meaningless “one of the only”. Is it the only one, or is it one of a few?
NeenerNeener
@opiejeanne: oh yes, and “the” is disappearing in front of nouns like hospital and prom. I wasn’t British when I was a child and went to “the hospital” but I guess we all are now when we “go to hospital”.
Scout211
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yes, that is definitely not proper English, I agree. However, my family uses it still to this day, but always with a wink or a laugh. I grew up in the Midwest and that word was commonly used. So we started using it in jest (with an upper Midwest accent) and I still love that word. YMMMV ?
lofgren
If you ever started talking about a woman without mentioning her name, my grandmother would say, “She, the cat’s mother?”
I think this was actually a 1950s feminism thing, based on the idea that women’s names are often overlooked. I.e. somebody will get identified as “my wife” and then by pronoun without ever giving her an independent identity. So I think it was more about gender politics than grammar.
Nevertheless, I often find myself muttering it to myself when I am going back to make sure the objects of my pronouns are completely clear.
sab
Regionalism that I used to hate but now use daily ” the dog needs fed.”
Steeplejack (phone)
Two increasingly common comma things that grate on me:
1. Using a city-state or city-country combo as some sort of singular compound unit without a comma, e.g., “The native of Denver, CO[,] said her biggest hope was . . .” Or “The blast was heard as far away as Dover, England and Calais, France.”
2. Can’t think of the technical term for this, but it’s basic sentence diagramming, which apparently they don’t teach now: “Joe Blow, the assistant secretary of whatever said that the department will be looking into the issue.” Need a comma after whatever. The basic sentence is “Joe Blow said x.” “Assistant secretary” is a modifying phrase.
Killeen
Increasing use of less where fewer is the appropriate word. It is everywhere now.
SiubhanDuinne
@Roger Moore:
Even MVP Harris, when she was a Senator, committed this error when she was grilling then-AG nominee Bill Barr during his confirmation hearings. It wasn’t quite egregious enough for me to write her off as a candidate, but I’ll admit to some hesitancy.
JAM
I thought it was short for “environmentally conscious”, but if so, it really sounds weird to leave that out.
cain
@Roger Moore:
I think a number of us engineers have started to get annoyed with the use of engineering when added to anything that isn’t really engineering – eg ‘community engineering’ or “community engineer” – wtf is community engineering? :-)
Or thanks to a certain president – “New-cular” vs “Nu-cu-lear” goddam.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steve:
Orientate.
Coronate.
Another Scott
@Scout211: I’m convinced this is why “myself” is taking over. People don’t remember the rules and think that “myself” is a workable universal substitute.
I’ve forgotten too many grammar rules, myself, but I’ve also noticed that my typos started increasing quite a bit after I turned about 55.
Woah/Whoa, Gandhi/Ghandi, e.g./i.e./op.cit., because/caused by/owing to/resulted from/due to, etc., etc. Lots of land mines out there/their/they’re!
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Butch:
BTDT. Superfund paid the mortgage for most of two decades.
We are a very messy people.
“Ten items or less” is a recurring peeve trigger for me.
hueyplong
Apostrophe’s in plural’s.
A sign of societal collapse surpassed only by the 2016 presidential election.
NoraLenderbee
@Butch: Hello, fellow editor. Ready to liaise and grow the business? Just let me sleep my computer first.
@Another Scott: Yes! People have this vague idea that the word “me” is crass and uncouth in all uses. “She gifted it to Bob and myself.” Aaaaah!
Plain Dave
@quakerinabasement:
Mine is then instead of than.
montanareddog
@SiubhanDuinne: Obligate!
Roger Moore
@Baud:
People have apparently been using “gift” to mean “give as a gift” for centuries. I suspect it’s one of those things that goes in and out of style, and people are bothered by it when it’s coming back into style.
montanareddog
The subject of the thread is catnip to the olds (I include myself in that category, before anyone takes umbrage)
Baud
@Roger Moore:
I don’t care how long it’s been in use. It is something up with which I shall not put.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@sab: My first boss in the 80s was a South Carolina farm boy (but an educated guy, an engineer) and he had a bunch of those regionalisms, most of which I don’t remember. We still say “might could” around our house.
In that same job I had a colleague who would say “I’d just as lief”, which I’d never run into outside of Shakespeare. That might could of been a regionalism, but I don’t know where she was from.
opiejeanne
@montanareddog: How about lath/lathe. I see this too often, when referring to lath and plaster. A lathe is a power tool used for shaping wood, a lath is a thin piece of wood with several uses, including lath and plaster.
citizen dave
I third the motion to kill the Greengrocers Apostrophe. I was only vaguely aware of the name and history, but its use has crept into things I see in the electric industry–wholesale markets area. It is annoying AF.
My longtime pet peeve is wrong use of affect/effect. I learned a lot of good stuff back in the day from The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. The BJ community is very strong on grammar usage. It’s a joy to be here and read here.
Raoul Paste
The flyer advertising my 50th high school reunion bragged about all the challenges that our classmates had “concurred”
But hell, if you’ve managed to live this long, we will just let that one go
Anoniminous
The use of “neuro-” to describe a – usually bullshit – field outside of Biology. “Neuro-economics” and “neuro-marketing” are two I find particularly loathsome.
lollipopguild
In my previous life of working full time I used to manage a paint store for PPG Paints. The misspellings, bad grammar and strange sentence structure that came in e-mails from company executives was astonishing and LOL funny.
Redshift
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
That reminds me of one I was reminded of recently because I’ve been doing door-knocking – people who have an apostrophe in their family name on a sign or doormat, like “The Johnson’s”.
So there’s one Johnson living here? And what makes them The Johnson?
Hungry Joe
Not using a personal pronoun before a gerund: “We appreciate you being here tonight.” Should be “ … YOUR being here tonight.” Looking at you, Rachel Maddow.
citizen dave
@montanareddog: We olds are “efforting” a complete list!
Steeplejack (phone)
@Roger Moore:
What do you mean by “irregular”?
opiejeanne
@germy: I love Benchley, thank you for sharing that essay with us.
Brantl
@Gravenstone: Word is frequently full of shit.
Redshift
@Roger Moore: I will always dislike the verb gift because the first time I encountered it was “I would like to gift her with a song,” spoken before a performance by someone who had an undeserved high opinion of her own talents.
eclare
@Steeplejack (phone): That is an excellent idea to go to his friend’s grave and sing.
opiejeanne
@Gravenstone: No it doesn’t. I will go to my grave clutching my beloved “of”.
Jim Appleton
@cmorenc: Fascinating. Please tell me more.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Baud:
No, it comes from dumb-fuck stupid trendiness. I blame magazine listicles. Most Americans have trouble “taking things” from other parts of English, much less foreign languages.
montanareddog
@lollipopguild:I work in a multi-national with many colleagues for whom English is their second language and I am very indulgent of their mistakes. But I had to step in and advise a colleague recently when he used bugger (the noun form) in an email to me. Fine for me but it was clear that he had no idea that it might offend people if he used it again in a work email.
Lacuna Synecdoche
It’s a “Bangism” (from Lester Bangs). At least that’s who I first read that used it.
And I think most of the people who use it once in while (like me) know that it’s not generally standard usage, but use it in homage to, or as a rip-off of, Bangs’s style.
Anyway, it does adhere to basic English word formation rules, in the same way as anyway, anywhere, anyhow, and so on. So I suspect that while anywho is not general usage (as opposed to anyone), it is grammatically correct.
That said, anyhoo is clearly a purposely incorrect spelling intended to symbolically mimic – in writing – a colloquial dialect style of speaking.
Kristine
The use of “myself” instead of “I” when referring to a group of people. “Beth, Louis, and myself went to the store.”
I realize that ship has sailed, but it never ceases to irk me and I am definitely not a grammar purist. I commit many of the word crimes listed above, but that one aggravates me.
Shantanu Saha
My biggest grammar pet peeve: when people say “try and …” when they mean “try to …”.
Like most grammar faux pas, it most happens in spoken language, but I see it often enough in written language that I do a slow burn to avoid calling the writer an idiot out loud.
Scout211
@montanareddog:
I think there may just be a few commenters here who “resemble” that remark! ?
SiubhanDuinne
@opiejeanne:
As long as we’re in the workshop, how about vise/vice?
WaterGirl
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Wise choice. Do not feel guilty.
paulnix
it should probably be excusable because it’s a French word, but it sets me on edge when people say “walla” instead of “voila”
germy
@opiejeanne:
“My Ten Years in a Quandary (And How They Grew)” is one of my favorites.
So much of his writing seemed to mock the idea of writing.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@SiubhanDuinne:
Oh yeah. That’s a pet peeve I share, along with the aforementioned lose/loose.
opiejeanne
@montanareddog: Enthused. No one was enthused when I was in school, they were enthusiastic (about something).
PJ
I haven’t been in school for many years, so I have no opinion if part of the problem is that grammar is not taught anymore (though I know penmanship isn’t taught, which is why many younger people write as if they are still five years old.)
But for me, the three biggest culprits are 1) texting, where writers can’t be bothered to figure out what’s correct because it takes too long to correct when texting; 2) auto-correct, which often chooses the wrong word, spelling, or usage; and, institutionally, 3) the lack of editors and secretaries, who in the past would correct all these errors before letters were sent or articles or books were printed. These are all things that could be repaired, but because it would take money and changing the behavior of the tech industry, I don’t think there’s much hope for that.
Roger Moore
@cain:
I’m a big less bothered when people invent new schools of “engineering” to imply that they’re creating something in a disciplined, systematic way rather than just by the seat of their pants. So “community engineering” means you’re trying to build a community using tried and tested methods rather than going by touch and feel. I’m much more bothered by people who try to call everyone in a field some kind of engineer, diluting the meaning of engineer as applied to that field. A sanitation engineer is someone who designs sanitary systems; it’s not a fancy pants name for a trash collector.
Steeplejack (phone)
@smith:
This error kills me. You see it a lot in movies and TV shows from “intelligent” characters. (Looking at you, Sherlock on Elementary.) I always want to
point outscream, “Would you say, ‘They gave the tickets to I’?”Dorothy A. Winsor
@PJ: We may also be seeing writing from a wider variety of people than we used to. There are fewer gatekeepers.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
One that I’m guilty of is “nauseous”. It was not very many years ago when I learned that the correct word is “nauseated”, and I still find it hard to say that word in speech. So with apologies, I will continue to feel nauseous at some of these grammar misuses.
Jim Appleton
I am empathetic, but I also have a grammatical cringe with the gender-neutral “they”. The person did X and they felt good about it.
Steeplejack (phone)
@RSA:
I yam what I yam.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: “Internetting” is awful squared when people use it to be clever or cute, which is 99% of the time.
ET
If punctuation counts
Oxford. Comma.
That is my Big one.
SiubhanDuinne
OTOH, I use “hopefully” in both spoken and written English, despite a brief, long-ago time in my life when I paid attention to William Safire’s strictures.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
This isn’t my number one pet peeve but appears to not have been mentioned: on track vs. untracked. This is a common mistake that it seems about 100% of sportscasters make these days. It’s on-track, has always been on-track. Getting back on track makes sense. Getting “untracked” is a bad thing but they seem to think it’s good…they use it to describe a player who is struggling and they say he needs to get untracked. No, he needs to get back on the track as being on the track improves performance vis a vis being off the track, which usually means you’ve hit a wall, gone off the rails, or run yourself off a cliff or at least into a ditch.
Jackie
Those ones. Or them ones. Those and them are plural. Ones is NOT a word!!! My college educated sister is chronically guilty of saying these. She is 65. I don’t correct her – it’s a habit she’s had all her life (I used to when she was a teen and in her twenties,) but, it’s fingernails on a blackboard cringeworthy every. time. I hear. it!???
lollipopguild
@montanareddog: “hellfarht” in german means “have a bright journey’ or “have a good trip”.
phein62
@JAM: Maybe the copywriter is French. “Consciousness” and “conscience” are both la conscience, as in the “conscience collectif.”
Another Scott
@Hilfy: For that, I blame math class. There is no “fewer than” sign.
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
opiejeanne
@Kristine: Funny, but I’ve been seeing the speaker/writer putting themselves first in a group of people going to the store. Me and him and Freddie went to the store. My teachers insisted that the writer put themselves after the others in the list, because it was polite. Him, and Freddie, and myself went to the store.
Hmmmm.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: Do you remember the awesome photo of a sign that Betty Cracker posted years ago? So many apostrophes on one small sign, and all of them used incorrectly.
I think there may have been one spot that actually called for an apostrophe, but of course the sign didn’t have one there.
justawriter
Orientated instead of oriented drives me up a wall. However, the usage has become so common it is almost standard English now so I must move on to other battles now.
opiejeanne
@SiubhanDuinne: Vise/vice, as in vise versa? Sorry, that’s terrible.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Kristine:
I use that one sometimes. But only when “I” sounds awkward (in line with Orwell’s sixth rule of writing), or when it feels like I’ve been using the word “I” too much (which I guess is really just a subset of awkward).
——
Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing (from Politics and the English Language):
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous
Chris T.
I make pets of most of my grammar (and spelling) peeves, so there are no real favorites. Or favourites, when I’m reading The Guardian. I did, however, decide that we should treat all group nouns as plural. That’s a bit of a British-ism, saying things like “Marks and Spencer are where I got this sandwich”, but Americans (USAliens?) do this in bits and pieces: “I went to Target. They sold me this sandwich!”
cope
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Two thoughts on my part. First, how would you feel if you or your wife got sick if you attended and sang at the service? Second, what do you think Frank would tell you to do?
Steeplejack (phone)
@SiubhanDuinne:
I kind of like Betty Cracker’s “anyhoo”! It’s usually a deliberate destressor after some paragraph covering dire political shit. But yes on the other. It’s li’l, not l’il or lil’. The apostrophe is standing in for stuff that’s getting omitted.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: I love when Betty Cracker says things like ‘anyhoo’.
geg6
Aww and awe. I can’t tell you how many times people in my FB feed at commenting on a cute picture of a dog or cat or baby with “awe” instead of “aww.” Drives me crazy.
Omnes Omnibus
@montanareddog: I will be surprised if the commentariat don’t tbogg this thread.
Haydnseek
My mom taught for a time during the depression in the proverbial one-room rural schoolhouse. She loved to tell this joke.
“Johnny was asked to name the things that were wrong in this sentence. ‘If i’d a knowed you was a comin’ I’d a baked a cake.”
His answer: “If I’d a knowed you was a comin’ I’d a baked a pie.”
WaterGirl
@sab: Oh, no! You have gone to the dark side. That usage makes me crazy!
opiejeanne
@germy: We used to get his essays sometimes in HS readers, when we were lucky. We didn’t have just one book for English class but the compilations had some real gems from people like Richard Armour and Ogden Nash. I got to hear both of them speak when I was a teenager, and I got out of school to do so.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Yep, that one too. It doesn’t bug as much as some of the others – but I always notice it, and try to avoid it in my writing. I try to avoid it in my speaking patterns too, but I suspect I’m a little less successful there.
Scout211
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I learned the difference from an emergency room resident physician when I was admitted for anaphylaxis. He stopped to correct me as I was trying to recite my symptoms to him. “No, you are nauseated, not nauseous. If you are nauseous, that means you are causing others to become nauseated.” Uh, okay, Doc.
It was a lesson I could never unlearn. And I have tried!
Suzanne
“Free reign”.
God, that hurt just to type.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Gravenstone:
Which is one of the reasons that I have grammar checking turned off in Word.
lollipopguild
@Steeplejack (phone): Is that you Popeye?
Fleeting Expletive
Wish I had checked in here earlier today, like closer to the top of this thread, as grammar is one of my favorite closet hobby-horses. Some conversational cliches just curl my ears, and I could rattle them off in an impressive list, but I won’t do it right now.
I’ll save it and revisit the topic another time. Now to get more coffee and refine my justifiable objections to dumbassery.
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack (phone):
“Irregular” means that it doesn’t follow the standard rule for inflecting a word. For example, “deer” uses the irregular plural “deer” rather than the regular “deers”, and “lead” uses the irregular “led” as past tense rather than the regular “leaded”. I would be more forgiving of someone who used “leaded” as the wrong past tense form than someone who uses “lead” but pronounced like “led”; at least they’re messing up by following the standard rule rather than just making something up.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack (phone):
That overcorrection probably comes from the near-universal experience of childhood:
Kid: Billy and me got into a fight.
Teacher: Billy and I.
Kid: Me and my sister went to the movies. Parent: My sister and I.
The corrections are often context-free, and the kid grows up to think that the formula is “—— and I” no matter what function it serves in the sentence.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@sab:
Regionalism/Slang that I used to hate but now use semi-regularly: “My bad.”
I just got more comfortable with “My bad” when I realized it was a literal translation of “Mea culpa.”
Jerzy Russian
@Hoodie:
This happens to me all of the time.
opiejeanne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Maybe I’m not remembering correctly, but I thought that saying “I’m nauseous” meant you were admitting that you made other people sick.
WaterGirl
@Hungry Joe: Word yells at me if I use “you” in that context.
Now I silently tell Word to fuck off and use it anyway.
Steeplejack (phone)
@De-lurking just this once:
That’s sort of a bounce-back from should’ve.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@opiejeanne: You are correct, but somehow I went most of my life not knowing that. And so “nauseous” is deeply ingrained and “nauseated” feels weird.
Suzanne
Another one: words that end in -ium, such as stadium, auditorium, gymnasium, should be pluralized as stadia, auditoria, gymnasia. But I see dumb shit like “sports stadiums” all the time. Fuck.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack (phone): The nuns in my catholic grade school would like to have a word with you.
geg6
@Central Planning:
Oh, I despise that! I just immediately start judging that person harshly even though it’s a common usage. I. don’t. give. a. fuck. I’m not common.
Major Major Major Major
The thing I hate more than anything else is actually correct. In British English they sometimes omit a ‘that’ in the following type of construction:
American:
British:
I always have to re-read the sentence when this happens.
Omnes Omnibus
@justawriter: Orientate is British usage. Or a word that means turning something thing so that it faces East.
Ken
On those rare occasions when I’ve wanted to give an example of a regular verb, I’ve had a surprising amount of trouble thinking of one.
Roger Moore
@Jim Appleton:
Using “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun is probably here to stay. It’s been used for a long time when talking about someone whose gender is unknown (“When someone opens the door, they should make sure to shut it behind them”); what’s really different now is that it’s being used to talk about a specific person who wishes to avoid gendered pronouns.
Steeplejack (phone)
@cain:
I worked in software for 25 years, and anytime somebody described himself [sic] as a “software engineer” internal alarms went off.
Madeleine
I grit my teeth over “more so” when “so” is unnecessary and often meaningless. More annoying is the speaker putting themself first when mentioning themself along with one or more others, as in “George asked me and Joe to go for drinks,” or, worse, “me, Jane, and Joe went for drinks” (I think that’s more common than the still incorrect “I and Joe.” (I’ve probably annoyed someone with “themself”—oh,well.)
opiejeanne
@Roger Moore: I’ve been seeing “casted” when they mean “she was cast in that part …”
Jim Appleton
@Scout211: Reminds me of the hospital press conference shortly after the Reagan assassination attempt.
Some ER person described Nancy arriving and “gestating wildly.”
BC in Illinois
I was a book editor for six years, back in the last century, and I have been known to commit copy editing in my spare time. (I am now an uncredited editor for a student working on his doctorate, for whom English is his third language. It’s a lot of fun, and I’m learning about the Lutheran Church in Ethiopia.)
I am someone who reads Dreyer’s English for the fun of it.
But for all the nit-picky details and commas to get in line, what I remember most from my editing time was this sign, handing in the Editorial Services Department:
WaterGirl
I’m not sure it’s a pet peeve, but I always notice that people use different spellings for the words that is the shortened version of hurray!
Yay! (to me is a celebration)
Yeah (to me is soft agreement and a lead-in to another sentence)
But some people use ‘yeah’ or ‘yah’ to express celebration or happiness.
?♀️
Ken
(Patient projectile vomits all over the doctor.)
Doctor: “All right, you’re nauseous.”
WaterGirl
@Jim Appleton: Ha!
opiejeanne
@Ken:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
Terry Pratchett
Jim Appleton
@Roger Moore: Agreed and seconded. It still grates ( greats?) a bit.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
This is an example of what I was saying about wrongly using the regular form being less bothersome. I know that “stadiums” is incorrect, but it doesn’t bother me that much because it’s an attempt to make a word follow the general rule.
Ken
Seems reasonable, since according to the OED it’s been used that way for about 700 years.
Niques
@Steve: I think stupid people add syllables to make simple words sound more important. When home improvement/decorator shows became popular, the word “functionality” replaced the perfectly useful and correct “function.”
Steeplejack (phone)
@Anoniminous:
Maybe Balloon Juice can finally crack the top 10,000 if word gets around that we’re neuroblogging here.
Bill Dunlap
As a former newspaper copy editor, I have a lot of peeves. Two that I haven’t seen here are “mentee” for one who is mentored by someone. A mentor doesn’t ment. He is someone inspired my an ancient Greek, Mentor. The other is “first world” referring to advanced countries as opposed to third world countries. There is no first world. There is the Old World, the New World and, more recently, the third or developing world of countries.
Scout211
@Ken:
It’s like you were there. . . Doc? Is that you? ?
Steeplejack (phone)
@Redshift:
It gets especially weird with surnames where the plural doesn’t look “right,” e.g., the Joneses, the Hendrixes.
Suzanne
@opiejeanne: Don’t get me started on “gifted”.
“I was gifted this ugly sweater.”
Sandia Blanca
@montanareddog: This “old” agrees completely. I have such a long list . . .
In addition to the “I/me/myself” perversion mentioned earlier, Americans are losing the ability to form possessives. I’ve heard several educated people use abominations such as “he and I’s opinion” instead of “his and my opinion.”
In line with the confusion between “loath” and “loathe,” frequently people discussing the coronavirus will say a patient is not able “to breath.” There are two words, folks–breath is the noun, breathe is the verb.
Living in Texas, I hear many people confuse the simple past tense with the past perfect, so we end up with “They had ran out of time” instead of “they had run out of time.”
zhena gogolia
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Don’t. Frank would understand.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
As I said, “they” has been used to talk about individuals whose gender is unknown to the speaker for a very long time. A few grammarians will complain about this and suggest using either an ungainly alternative like “he/she” or “he” as the generic form, but even they will often turn out to use “they” in that context in casual speech. What’s new and hard for stick-in-the-muds to get used to is using “they” to speak about a specific person who doesn’t want to identify as male or female.
geg6
@lollipopguild:
Probably because correct grammar is not a highly respected talent here in the Pittsburgh area.
pluky
Two for me:
Jealousy for Envy, and vice versa. Folks, one is jealous of what one has, and envious of what others have. Keep it straight.
“Artisan” anything. It’s “artisanal”!
zhena gogolia
@Bill: Yes!
And “we got bored of it.”
Jill
@Central Planning:
using ask as a noun slides into another pet irritant for me—admin jargon. I’m sick of going down the rabbit hole, putting it in the parking lot and getting granular on the subject.
Richard Fox
“Creatives” as a term drives me bonkers. I see it all the time these days. I picture in my mind children with crayons. Not putting down the kids but it comes off as so juvenile to me to use that word.
Benw
@Basilisc:
They’re actually homophones. Whoa is what you say to a horse. Woah is what you say when you see something stupendous, like a man leaping from the top of one skyscraper to another.
Ken
@Steeplejack (phone): Oh yes. If I want to refer to the farm where the Douglas family lives, is that the “Douglass’s farm”, the “Douglasses’ farm”, or the “Douglasses’s farm”? And how are any of those pronounced? Hardly surprising some people just say “the Douglas farm”, or even “the old Haney place”.
zhena gogolia
I hate, hate, hate the word “mentee.”
“mentor” comes from the name of a figure in Greek mythology. We now have a verb from it, “to mentor.” All well and good.
But on the analogy of “employee” (“to employ” — “the one who is employed”), we now have “mentee” (“to ment” — “the one who is mented”).
Should be “mentoree,” if you really must have such a word.
geg6
@ET:
But the use of the Oxford comma IS correct. You can choose it or the AP style, but there is nothing wrong with it.
oatler
I love the Binging With Babish guy on Youtube but he’s really slack with his use of “up”. Serve up, fry up, firm up, plate up, lid up, glove up… and while I’m ranting, using “binge” as a verb!
NoraLenderbee
@Suzanne:
Those don’t bother me because to me, stadium, gymnasium, and so on have fully become English words, and regular English plurals sound appropriate. What gets me is the Latin plurals that people add to words *incorrectly:* octopi, virii (plural of virus), genii (pl. of genius), etc.
Jim Appleton
@Roger Moore: Inflected languages have been gendered for longer than 700 years. Again, I get and easily adopt the neutral “they,” it still creates grammatic dissonance.
I may be in mud, but I ain’t no stick.
Roger Moore
@Jill:
Strunk & White had an interesting section on jargon. The were generally opposed to it, but they recognized that some jargon terms were destined to become standard usage over time. It’s interesting to jargon from decades ago along with their ideas about what was likely to become standard usage. The one I remember was the use of “update” to mean “pushing the expected or demanded date forward”, which they expected to become standard usage.
MomSense
@NeenerNeener:
Thats like hard ROAD to hoe. Why would anyone be hoeing a road?
Steeplejack (phone)
@SiubhanDuinne:
It’s really hard to think of a “correct” substitute for “hopefully.”
oatler
@NoraLenderbee:
But don’t we all agree that the plural of stewardess is stewardii?
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Hoodie:
OOH, yeah. I absolutely, positively, know the difference between possessive pronouns and contractions that are hominems (your/you’re, their/they’re, and so on), but my fingers seem to be completely ignorant of the distinction.
It even bugs me when I see others make the same mistake, even though I know I do it half the time too.
But whenever I think your or you’re, for instance, while typing, my fingers just randomly select a spelling.
Our and are are a similar pet peeve.
Fortunately, I never make that particular mistake, but only because the particular dialect of English I speak (an overlapping Mid-Altantic/Eastern Seaboard/NE Pennsyltucky/Greater New York dialect that is almost, but not quite, unaccented – it has a specific name, I just don’t remember it right now) has distinct pronunciations for our and are (our rhymes with hour, not are).
The Dangerman
Irregardless, I could care less.
geg6
@Suzanne:
Media, too. It’s a collective noun, not just one medium.
Roger Moore
@zhena gogolia:
“Protegee” is also acceptable.
MomSense
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
It’s the love that matters most. You can listen to a beautiful choral piece and think of him.
I’m partial to The Peace of Wild Things because Berry’s verse is so beautiful.
quakerinabasement
@SiubhanDuinne:
Watch out. Betty Cracker is comin’ for ya.
opiejeanne
@zhena gogolia: Isn’t “We got bored of it” a British usage?
I realized a few years ago that the British say “different to” when we generally use “different from”, and “homely” to describe a. house, when we would use “homey”.
JoyceH
Others have mentioned my worst bugaboos – rein in/reign in and infer/imply. Something that always irks me is “complected”. As in “dark complected” or “light complected”. It’s been used enough that some dictionaries grudgingly accept it, but to me it’s just tap dancing around the fact that you’re talking about skin color. Just say it.
BC in Illinois
@BC in Illinois:
*hanging
Damn, I need an editer.
quakerinabasement
@zhena gogolia: And what does this imply about those who use the services of a tutor? “Tutee” is unthinkable.
Roger Moore
@Jim Appleton:
Most gendered languages have a neuter gender. In fact, English is such a language. We’ve just decided to use male and female to refer almost exclusively to people who have a social gender and use neuter for almost everything else.
James E Powell
@Kristine:
That one grates on my ears, too. A related peeve is that people do not want to use “me” anymore. Examples: “Are you coming with David and I?” or “He gave the tickets to Mary and myself.”
TriassicSands
@jeffreyw:
Uniquely unique?
I agree, but the list is so huge now that I will die long before I crash the Internet.
Using adjectives as adverbs is on the list.
The topic here should be broader than strictly grammar. There are all kinds of usage mistakes and annoyances.
The influence of inadequately educated talking heads has contributed mightily to the degrading of the language. It’s not going to stop. People hear talking heads say something and adopt what they’ve heard.
One that I find very annoying is — “graduated college” (or high school).
Schools “graduate students.” Students graduate FROM schools.”
Another pet peeve, not grammar, is when someone says “that begs the question…” when they mean ” that raises the question…. ” Begging the question is a form of logical/argument fallacy. It has probably now been destroyed by the mundane usage. I think TV and radio are responsible.
I once heard a weather person use the word “precipitously” to refer to snowfall. Yikes! Fortunately, that didn’t catch on.
The general level of writing in the Post and Times is suffering. There is so much lazy writing. Recently, I’ve noticed that everyone in D.C. seems to be “leaning into” one thing or another. I commented on it in the Post, and within hours the same wording appeared in two other unrelated articles by different writers. It sounds idiotic to me. Dogs lean into human legs…
opiejeanne
@oatler: Binging with Babish should be Bingeing with Babish, shouldn’t it?
oatler
This is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.
Roger Moore
@oatler:
I think the accepted plural these days is “flight attendants”. It’s interesting how many words have been made gender neutral by choosing a different term that isn’t inherently gendered, e.g. steward/stewardess to flight attendant, mailman to postal carrier, policeman to police officer, etc. Then there are terms like waiter and actor where people have decided just to use them as ungendered even though they were clearly gendered a generation ago.
randy khan
If you want to read blog posts for fun typos and similar mistakes, the “Erik Visits an American Grave” posts are top notch.
Truth be told, I find them interesting and sometimes enlightening, particularly for people famous enough that I know their names but not famous enough that I know their biographies. (A lot of the music people are obscure enough that I’ve never heard of them, partly because I’m not a fan of old country music.)
Lacuna Synecdoche
@The Dangerman:
I actually find “irregardless” useful. It lets me know immediately that the author is a Grade A Idiot – that I can safely ignore the rest and move on to the next comment/post/article/whatever is next on my reading list.
I could care less instead of couldn’t care less, is another pet peeve though. It just doesn’t make any semantic sense. Whenever I hear someone say it, I think, “Do they even listen to themselves?”
SiubhanDuinne
@quakerinabasement:
Hence the disclaimer:
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore: “Actor” as used by the especially woke bothers me a lot, I must admit. (ie. The Guardian)
If everyone is an “actor”, get rid of the “Best Actress” category, for dog’s sake.
And don’t get me started on “pregnant people.”
randy khan
@Roger Moore:
This has been very interesting to watch over my lifetime. And welcome.
Frosty Fred
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: “Untrack” may come from western riding usage: “untrack him” means to shift a stubborn horse’s weight and get him to step out of his tracks and move on.
Taken4Granite
@Suzanne: Related: certain words that end in -on, such as criterion, phenomenon, and polyhedron form their plurals by changing the -on to -a. For example, there may be three criteria to consider in evaluating the proposal, but your comments focus on one criterion.
TriassicSands
@NeenerNeener:
I originally heard that as a kind of lame joke:
“It’s national cement week. Don’t take it for granite.”
@NeenerNeener:
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus: ?
opiejeanne
@TriassicSands: “Lean into” is from that idiotic book admonishing women to “lean into it” for success in combining child-rearing with a full career, which is advice specifically for women.
opiejeanne
@Roger Moore: On the other hand, authoress and poetess were abominations.
BRyan
Haven’t read the whole thread, so apologies if this one’s been covered: the complete (and increasingly widespread) misuse of “begging the question,” from its original meaning relating to circular reasoning to instead suggest it means “raising the question.” To the point where it’s now been officially blessed by one or another of the dictionary arbiters because it’s “in the vernacular.” As are so many things that are nonetheless grammatically incorrect. arghhh.
raven
I hate internet talk with no personal pronouns. “Just thought I’d chime in”.
Barbara
Well, okay. “Conscience” and “Conscious” are obviously different. But you have to be “conscious” about something in order for your “conscience” to tell you that you should make a “conscientious” effort to do something about it. So, I suppose, the idea is that the product is marketed at people who want to have a “clean conscience” about the diapers they are buying. That’s obviously what you think when you wrote this. But it could also be that it’s marketed to people who are “conscious” of the environmental impact of disposable diapers. “I am conscious of clean diapers and I want to use them.” It’s not necessarily a mistake on the part of the marketers to intentionally confuse these concepts.
cleek
why do you think they intended “clean conscience diapers” ?
why not “clean-conscious diapers”, as is “being aware of cleanliness” ? it’s just missing a hyphen because most people don’t like compound adjectives.
Steeplejack
@geg6:
Yay (cheer), yea (vote or biblical), yeah (yes).
Frosty Fred
@lofgren: “The cat’s mother” is older than the 50s, though the feminist angle may have played into the usage then. I’m sure it’s in one of the Peter Wimsey novels, for example, though I don’t know how to track it down.
Taken4Granite
@BC in Illinois: Dan Quayle was a master of this.
I always found the quizzes about whether some sentence was spoken by Yogi Berra, Dan Quayle, or George W. Bush to be easy. Berra often phrased things oddly, but his meaning was clear, e.g., “Let’s pair them up in threes.” Quayle generally had a good grasp of grammar (as opposed to spelling) while expressing incoherent thoughts. If both syntax and meaning were garbled, it was a Bush statement.
Roger Moore
@JoyceH:
The key is that most English dictionaries are primarily descriptive rather than prescriptive. That is they tell you how the language is used in practice rather than the way it should be used. Some will note when a form is a variant or less accepted usage and even say what the preferred form is, but they will continue to describe “incorrect” forms because people use them. You can also think of this as being dictionaries for readers who need to understand the language as it is written rather than for writers who need to understand the language as it’s supposed to be written.
Elizabelle
@opiejeanne: Not to mention pilotess. Chefess. Welderess.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack (phone):
Safire’s preference was “it is to be hoped.” I don’t care who you are, that’s just clunky and bad.
NoraLenderbee
@oatler:
Now you’re talking.
MagdaInBlack
I’m reluctant to ever comment again. I’m quite sure I will commit some grammar sin in the 5 or 6 sentences of my blog comment.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
True.
Major Major Major Major
Oh, I see this a lot: you’re perusing instructions or an FAQ and you’ll see a bullet point like “how this service works?” Now, the English “how DOES this service WORK” construction is relatively anomalous, so it makes sense that ESL people would get this wrong but I see it in younger native coworkers too.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
Also true.
Roger Moore
@opiejeanne:
I think the existence of those abominations has helped make people want to get rid of the gendered form of similar words.
opiejeanne
@Elizabelle: Thank goodness I’ve never seen those before now, or I might have had a stroke.
Bob7094
@Steeplejack (phone):
I worked in software for 40 years, and began calling myself a “software engineer” when my employer did. Indeed, some of the work I did in software engineering was the same as what the systems engineers and electrical engineers I worked with did.
Jumbo64
Gift as a verb.
Also, “I” as an object: “She gifted her collection of MAGA memorabilia to Jethro and I.” Take Jethro out and it would be “She gifted her collection to I.”
Major Major Major Major
@sab:
I use this a lot. I didn’t realize this was a regionalism until, after several years of marriage, my husband told me it was. Lol
Roger Moore
@MagdaInBlack:
It’s actually surprising this entire thread hasn’t devolved into a continuing example of Muphry’s Law.
Old School
My pet peeve is acronyms with the same word attached.
For example “ATM machine.”
(Automated Teller Machine Machine)
Major Major Major Major
@Bob7094: Software engineer is just the term we use now for professional adult coders of any skill level. Agree that most of them don’t actually know how engineering works, but whatcha gonna do. Just look for a ‘staff engineer’ if you want a real engineer.
Barbara
@cleek: You said what I was thinking but in a lot fewer words!
Shakti
TBH I like neither “conscious” nor “conscience” in that marketing. The first implies your kid is shitting something that is alive and alert and the second implies a diaper that has moral quandaries while absorbing feces and urine.
This is almost as disturbing as the questions raised by the sentient Chik-fil-A cows who write on the level of kids using whole sounds? Why are these cows smart and others dumb? Does this mean sentient chickens exist telling people to eat beef? What in The Secret of Nimh?
Taken4Granite
240+ posts in and nobody has linked to Weird Al’s contribution to this conversation?
Major Major Major Major
@Killeen:
I have some bad news about how lexicographers determine appropriateness…
@Steeplejack (phone):
You too :P
CCL
@smith: that’s my pet peeve as well. Skin crawls (ha ha) when I hear “between you and I.” Have a well-educated writer friend who does this all the time.
I am generally forgiving as, of course, living languages evolve – but that subjective pronoun used as the objective gets me frothing.
Barbara
@Old School: Oh yes, but sometimes it’s just too clunky to avoid. In my world, there are “PDPs” or “Prescription Drug” or “Part D” plans, except that you often see it written as “PDP plan.” Because for some reason “PD” Plan just isn’t done. You do see “PDP” as a standalone abbreviation as well but for some reason the brain really wants to see the word “plan” written out.
zhena gogolia
@quakerinabasement: It’s thinkable among university administrations.
Major Major Major Major
@PJ: There is a theory, not entirely without merit, that older Millennials and younger X’ers are the only people who truly know how to type on a computer, because we are the only people who were actually taught digital typing as children.
Kirk Spencer
All the game players on here and nobody else brought up rouge for rogue? (Twitch)
TriassicSands
Although, I have what I think is a fine “rule” on their usage, years ago in reading about “that” and “which,” I decided there is no universally agreed upon rule about when to use “that” and “which.”
@Central Planning:
And “invite” for invitation. Ooooh, invitation is just soooooo long. I don’t have time to say it. There are others in this category, too.
Steeplejack
@Suzanne:
Okay, I’ll take exception to that. Some big-shot language gurus (maybe Fowler, maybe Strunk and White) have made the convincing case that once a word gets ensconced in English it is better to “regularize” the plural rather than slavishly follow the rule from the old language.
Where you do see it is typically in -a words, e.g., minutiae, sequelae, where the singular has barely penetrated “mainstream” English except in certain specific areas.
Munira
@SiubhanDuinne: Good point.
Montanareddog
@Roger Moore: Ok, it’s a neologism not a grammar error but; I work in IT and you update data. If the data includes a number that is reduced (for example, if you take some money out of your bank account, reducing your balance) people have started to say the data has been downdated. Updated does not mean you have increased the number: it means you have brought it up to date! I cringe every time I hear that (and I hear it more and more, sadly)
JustRuss
For the one-millionth time, there is no “a” in “definitely”.
Richard Fox
“Anyways” I’ll just leave that here as I can’t bear to use it in a sentence by way of example. If that’s pedantic of me then I’m guilty as charged.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
Then they deserve to have their hands thwacked hard with an old-school wooden ruler.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: What did Samwise have to say about that???
Bob7094
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
I think of it as “I could care less, but I can’t be bothered to.”
dnfree
@germy: I started reading this and immediately thought “Sounds like Benchley!” I loved his humor when I was young. Apparently I still do.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Via Reddit.
https://i.redd.it/zodqvtcmm0q71.jpg
SiubhanDuinne
@opiejeanne:
The Brits (well, some Brits) still refer to the wife of a mayor as the “Lady Mayoress,” which is both sexist and redundant.
My grandmother regularly used “Negress” and “Jewess.” Even as a little girl I was uncomfortable with those terms, and now I find them repellent.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
I have to admit that even I, Trad McStickler, am coming around on this. Avoids so many ungainly constructions. Plus the whole “muh pronouns” thing.
Barbara
@Suzanne:
@Steeplejack: I am with Steeplejack on this one. We don’t speak Latin (nobody does, not really!), and once a word becomes “standard” English, as opposed to being an obviously foreign word we are using for effect, I think it’s better to follow standard English conventions in plural and possessive forms, with some exceptions where it seems reasonable to do so. I can’t stand seeing someone use “datum” where “fact” or “item” is what they mean, or just, you know, “data.” I also cringe when I see the word “criterion” when for all intents and purposes we only use “criteria” in the plural sense. When someone is correcting something I wrote to change criteria to criterion, I change the word to factor, item, reason, or whatever other word makes sense.
I am much more bothered by outright mistakes in grammar than I am by what seems like a deliberate choice in usage of new or unusual words. YMMV.
Fair Economist
This isn’t mixing up “conscious” and “conscience”. This is “conscious” gaining an additional meaning, short for “planet-conscious” or environmentally aware. Here the shortened version got picked, most likely, for a combination of alliteration and fitting on the packaging.
This is what languages do. Get used to it.
Major Major Major Major
@BRyan:
I’m really glad this happened. The legal usage is dumb and confusing and we already have a term for that–circular reasoning–which you were kind enough to provide. Whereas we didn’t have a great term for “this statement demands that we ask…”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Steeplejack (phone): Spanish has a word with that function, ojalá. There should be a law with “hopefully”, as there is with “ojalá”, that if you use it you have to use the subjunctive.
Percysowner
Hyperbole and a Half did a wonderful bit on alot..
Major Major Major Major
@Taken4Granite:
When I was a kid I said “pitch white” to mean “very white”, because wtf is pitch if not an adjective meaning “very”…
dnfree
@opiejeanne: the vice-presidential debate was referred to more than once as “the first and only vice-presidential debate”. If it’s the “only”, why add “first”?
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
I don’t like greenlit. It’s all a back-formation from, e.g., “they gave the project the green light,” so the project was “green-lighted,” not “greenlit.”
Suzanne
@SiubhanDuinne:
My grandmother used, uh, other terms.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: And software engineers evaluate the various options provided by computer scientists to determine what is best to code in any particular project.
Roger Moore
@TriassicSands:
My understanding is “that” is used when a description limits the thing it’s describing and “which” is used when it it’s purely descriptive. Normally this means “that” is used in-line while “which” is used as an appositive. So saying “the car that he drove” is specifying which car it’s talking about, while “the car, which he drove” is giving additional information about the car. An important side note is “that” used this way can often be omitted. “The car he drove” and “the car that he drove” mean the same thing, and avoiding “that” in this case makes the language tighter.
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
On the other hand, I see people write, “I pet the cat yesterday,” rather than “I petted the cat yesterday.” Ditto for “It fit in the frame” vs. “It fitted in the frame.”
Fair Economist
@Steeplejack:
Given that Chaucer, Shakespeare, *and* the King James Bible all used singular “they”, why would a traditionalist oppose it?
WereBear
It’s “You’ve got another THINK coming!”
Not thing! Auguhgh!
TriassicSands
Any preposition followed by a name (or pronoun) and “I.”
“They gave it to Bob and I.” “She talked about Sarah and I.”
Remove Bob or Sarah and you have “They gave it to I,” and “She talked about I.” Bob Marley would be proud of you.
That has become so commonplace that I always notice when it is said correctly.
This has taken over in film and television scripts. I suspect it is an ignorant response to the problem of misusing “me.” As pointed out above, “This is she” is correct, but most Americans say, “This is her,” or “This is him.” Similarly, “It is I” is correct, but “It’s me” dominates in everyday language.
But try explaining the use of the objective case after a preposition to someone who has never had grammar. It’s the object of a preposition, so obviously you want the objective pronoun, which is “me,’ not “I.” Huh?
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: Haha, well in his case what I was saying was that the CAT needed fed.
Scamp Dog
@Suzanne: I’ll fight you on that one! We don’t need to use Latin grammar rules in English. Stadiums, premiums, etc. are all well attested in English. “Premia” in particular sets me off.
Which leads into my other, more recent, peeve, “latinx.” Some people started showing off by borrowing Spanish grammar by using latino or latina depending on the gender of the person being discussed. I’ll admit to doing it a bit myself, it’s fun to show off on occasion. Then somebody pointed out that was sexist (which makes sense, actually), and decided to fix the situation by using notation from algebra: “Let’s use x to represent an unknown here!” Gahh! How about “Latins?” Standard English grammar, actually reflects English usage from 50 or so years back, and is actually pronounceable!
Thank you for adjusting the way you speak now that you’ve been told the correct way of doing things. :)
TriassicSands
@opiejeanne:
Thank you. I didn’t know that, but if it’s an “idiotic book,” that explains a lot.
Then, someone uses it in a prominent place and the sheep all follow.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think stadiums is incorrect. See my comment at #271.
Bnad
Around NYC, “all of a sudden” is slowly but surely being replaced by “all of the sudden”.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Bob7094:
You’re a more forgiving man than I, Bob7094.
Major Major Major Major
@Fair Economist: Probably the same reason that lots of traditionalists complain about sentence-ending prepositions even though that was a fake rule made up by Francophiles.
Ruviana
@JustRuss: Ooh, using defiantly when they mean definitely (or likely definately).
Barbara
@dnfree: Expressions like “first and only” just don’t bother me. My daughter and I were reading a history of English, and this kind of “double use” is common in English. Think, “law and order.” Law and order mean different things now, but they were closer in meaning at one time. This “doubling” practice arose as England transitioned from French being the language of the elite and the legal system, to English. Words that meant essentially the same thing became paired so that speakers of either could figure out what was intended. “It is right and just that we . . .”
Now, this kind of use of similes to emphasize a point seems totally normal to English: being “cool, calm and collected . . .”
TriassicSands
@Roger Moore:
That has been my understanding, but, as I said, some may disagree. And the Brits may be a problem (they usually are since they can’t pronounce the language they invented (an inside joke between a British friend and me).
oatler
@opiejeanne:
Try telling a birthday party full of eight-year-old girls that “princess” is an abomination.
Major Major Major Major
@Scamp Dog:
IMO the real reason not to say ‘latinx’ is that only 3% of ‘latinx’ people say it. Just say ‘Hispanic’–they do!
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
Because we’re using it differently. The traditional use of singular they is for an individual whose gender isn’t or can’t be known by the speaker, as when speaking hypothetically (“If someone opens the door, they should close it when they’re done”). Even stickers who complain about singular they wind up using it this way unconsciously. What’s new is using singular they to talk about a specific person who chooses not to identify as male or female. That really is new, and the underlying concept takes some getting used to.
Another Scott
@Bill Dunlap: My understanding is that First World is a cold-war political term. First is the Western Democracies, Second is USSR, China, etc., Third is the nonaligned countries. It also has been applied to economics (which generally ended up with the same countries in the groups).
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim Appleton
@Fair Economist: I think it comes down to the verb. They are. Using a plural form for a singular is dissonant. Not incorrect, but dissonant.
Skepticat
I’m a proofreader and a copy editor, so it’s all of them, Katie; however, the latest issue that makes my teeth itch is “around” rather than “about” or even “for.”
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Bnad:
Umm, okay …
I mean, maybe that’s true – I don’t get out that much these days. I hope it isn’t though.
Anyhow, just as a piece of contributory anecdata: I’ve never heard anyone say “all of the sudden”, and I live in mid-town Manhattan.
Ruckus
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Just my opinion of course but if you are truly uncomfortable going and singing then don’t do it.
A pandemic is a different time than non pandemic times. Normally life can kick our asses in many ways and often does but during a pandemic it’s us kicking life, very often taking away the opportunity to sing and leaving the opportunity to be sung about. There are two ways to live through a pandemic and the first is to isolate as much as possible – mask and stay the hell out of crowds of 2 or more, and second, having effective vaccines in arms, which we now do, but not to a high enough percentage. And because too many are ignorant fucks too many are not vaccinated.
Booger
@Elizabelle: Flashdance–the seminal film in the Welderess genre.
Roger Moore
@Scamp Dog:
My understanding is that “Latinx” was invented as an LGBTQ thing to point out that not everyone identified as male or female. It’s been used otherwise, but that was the origin.
Steeplejack
@Bill Dunlap:
“First World” and “Third World” (and the less used “Second World”) are artifacts of the Cold War: modern, mostly democratic nations of the West (First), the (modern, industrialized) Communist nations (Second) and the less advanced, non-aligned nations (Third).
The definitions and usage have shifted over time. The Wikipedia article is pretty good.
Fair Economist
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, exactly. A bunch of grammarians tried to import a bunch of grammatical rules from Latin and/or French in the 19th century, including “don’t split infinitives”, “no ending with prepositions”, and “all singular pronouns must be gendered”. They don’t belong in English and force awkward usage issues that English had long before solved, by not following them.
Barbara
@Lacuna Synecdoche: Every time I read the expression “in the event,” a British usage for what most Americans refer to as “in any event,” I am reminded that there are many, many expressions that are not set in stone. English, in particular, seems to be malleable in this manner.
Gravenstone
Right. Instead, they should be raking the forest the road passes through.
Ruviana
@Sandia Blanca: I think this is becoming widespread as people avoid the past perfect, especially if it’s irregular. And can I give a shout out to it’s/its? The bane of my teaching years!
Steeplejack
@Benw:
That’s bullshit. Turn in your pica pole.
JoyceH
Just thought of another peeve. The pit of the stomach originally was a location in the body. You felt a {feeling} in the pit of your stomach. Now I quite often hear people describe when they felt horrified or dismayed or whatever as ‘I felt a pit in my stomach’.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore: My peeve with “Latinx” is that it sounds awkward, because it’s a style of declension you’d never hear in any Romance language. If you want to add a neutral adjective to “Latin”, you should do it Latin-style, with a different appended vowel or smooth syllable. “Latine”. which I’ve heard proposed, would be way better.
Barbara
@Roger Moore: I think that the word “Latin” could serve as a substitute for most uses of Latinx. “Latin” obviously still means the formal language of Rome even though no one speaks it anymore. But still, I have certainly seen “Latin” used to describe something that is from or bears the influence of “Latin America” shortened to “Latin influence.” It’s not perfect, but it seems preferable to Latinx, which a lot of people are going to pronounce as if it rhymes with “minx.”
cleek
i would like to strangle everyone who uses “on a/an X basis” to say exactly what X already means.
“i tug my pug on a daily basis!”
“so, you tug your pug daily?”
“basically!”
cope
@Barbara: Similar to saying “My PIN number is…” or “The VIN number on my car is…”.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Why not just protégé? Or maybe apprentice. They have slightly different overtones, but mentee is right out.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@De-lurking just this once:
Yep, that’s another one. It’s somewhat understandable, as a homonym of “should’ve.”
But I still hate it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@cope: Or, the La Brea Tar Pits.
WhatsMyNym
@Major Major Major Major:
Thanks, I needed a good laugh to start the day!!
?BillinGlendaleCA
It’s an Open Thread…
I have a job interview tomorrow morning for a photo retouching position.
Steeplejack
@JoyceH:
Dark-complexioned would be better.
Major Major Major Major
@WhatsMyNym: Well, if we’re trying to differentiate between the different names for bad typists.
Steeplejack
@quakerinabasement:
Student.
Barbara
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Well holy gee, I don’t think you should go to a funeral service to get some real time data on which side of the opinion divide is correct. Stay home!
SiubhanDuinne
@Bnad:
I was going to mention that. I remember clearly the first time I heard “all of the sudden.” One of the schoolchildren in The Birds was talking about running from the aggressive birds, and then “all of the sudden” they knocked her down and “all of the sudden” they were pecking at her. It sounded odd to me 60 years ago, and it still does.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think Spanish has a neuter gender.
Barbara
@Steeplejack: Nope, Spanish doesn’t have the equivalent of a non-gender-specific article. Nor does French.
Ruckus
@opiejeanne:
Far more than just wood. A lathe is a power tool to make things round and to size. Wood, metals, plastics…
I’ve made things from wheel molds for car wheels, to wooden bottle samples to set up bottle filling production lines, the molds to make the same bottles – the insides were round the outsides are most assuredly not, and so on.
SiubhanDuinne
@Bnad:
Another NYCism is “standing (or waiting) on line” rather than “in line.”
germy
Not grammar, but:
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
Yeah, I sort of want to see an e in there when the gerund could be mispronounced or confused with another word. Also whinging/whingeing. But it’s a vague sort of unease. ?
wizened_guy
When did “try to…” become “try and…,” which makes no logical sense? Drives me crazy.
Also too, using “less than” when you mean “fewer than.”
Old School
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Or The Los Angeles Angels.
Major Major Major Major
@Barbara: If you ask Hispanics they say to say Hispanic or Latino, I don’t know why this gets lost when discussing the term.
Old School
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I hope you meet the qualifications.
Scamp Dog
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Best of luck! I know you’ve got some mad skillz to tell them about.
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
If you use a vise wrong is is a vice.
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
But aviatrix, executrix and dominatrix are cool.
Gravenstone
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Best of luck! But I swear to bob that I first read that as potato retouching and thought, that’s oddly specific…
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
That sounds right up your alley.
This grammar thing is so much fun….
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Barbara:
I always think of those as having two distinct meaning: “In the event” meaning “In case this specific thing happens” vs. “In any event” meaning “Whatever happens” or “Whatever condition” or “Whether or not”.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Steeplejack:
Agreed. I was thinking the same thing.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
And this descriptivist trend is accelerating with dictionaries moving on line and being “updated” much more frequently.
Ken
Singular “they” takes singular “are” and “were”, obviously.
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
The Rio Grande River. The Hoi Polloi.
JanieM
I was going to stay out of this thread, since I could have filled it up all by myself, but while I was skimming it my son called from Yellowstone and said, “Would you say ‘Wildlife is dangerous’ or ‘Wildlife are dangerous’?”
Ken
Oh, God, yes! I hate that one. If it’s the first time you’ve seen the photo, you can’t be re-touching it, now can you? Just call it “photo touching”.
:-) Congratulations!
Major Major Major Major
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Oh cool, break a leg!
Barbara
@Major Major Major Major: I understand Hispanic to refer to people who speak Spanish, but I don’t think that is exactly set in stone either. As for why “Latino” doesn’t bother 98% of the population to whom it refers, it’s because, duh, they are so used to articles and adjectives having “genders” that they don’t think about it. Words are “feminine” or “masculine” seemingly at random. Why is the word mustache or beard or tie feminine? Huh, huh? How many women do you know who have beards or mustaches? So, basically, it seems to be the reaction of an English speaking community, that assigning the male gender adjective “Latino” to describe the members of both genders is somehow more consequential than it really is, because their own language doesn’t do that.
The Dangerman
Another one that I blame my HS English teacher for the peeve; I’m not sure It’s correct but it is what I was taught and it drives me nuts.
HSET: Reputation is always a negative, I.e. “he/she has a good reputation” is wrong.
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
Shouldn’t that be Intternnetting? ;~) As long as you’re doubling up letters, do ’em all is my slogan, for a laugh!
Steeplejack
Okay, this one is way out there, deep in the mists of the 20th century, and I can’t find any documentation for it, but I could swear that there used to be a distinction between whew (relief) and phew (stinky). Anyone else remember that?
This thread is reminding me once again that I would like to acquire a copy of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, the unabridged edition from Random House in 1966. I think that was the last great American dictionary, and it would be a good cross-reference to the Oxford English Dictionary. Hmm, I’ll have to look it up (again).
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Old School: Heh, I hope so too.
@Scamp Dog: Thanks, it’s a full time position as opposed to part time at the orange apron place.
sab
@Barbara: I did not know that.
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
Are you serious? I’ve never seen those.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Gravenstone: Probably all the discussion about Dan Quale upthread…
@Ruckus: Heh, it’s what I do for fun now.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Scout211:
Okay, now I’ll never be able to unlearn it – maybe I already intuited it without thinking about it before.
But even though I consciously know it now (Damn you, Scout211!), I will probably stick to using nauseous. The latter usage is so common that it’s practically standard English now.
Pointedly using nauseated instead, and there probably isn’t any way to unpointedly use it, would make one sound like a pedantic know-it-all douche – which, to be fair, I am, but I don’t necessarily want to advertise it all the time.
Ruckus
@BC in Illinois:
I like that.
Is that correct?
Now that got me laughing.
Better – worse?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: …or JeJuDo Island.
Roger Moore
@Old School:
There deserves to be a special place in Hell for the person who came up with “The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim”.
Ruckus
@Ken:
More laughter!
Keith P.
I, for one, welcome our diaper overlords
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You know it’s almost like the people who set up the spelling rules for English were a back of tools trying to pretend they were really French speakers just to trip everyone else up outside their little Good Old Boys club.
Ruckus
@opiejeanne:
Terry is a smart man, who understands that while usage has proper rules, people break rules all the time and often the world gets better doing so.
JustRuss
Wildlife can be dangerous. More accurate, and you don’t have to choose. (Although I’d go with “are”.)
Barbara
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Rules? What rules? Where do you see rules? I don’t see any rules! The only rule I know of is that the correct spelling is whatever was most common when the word first appeared in a dictionary!
J
Not so much a peeve, but something that I think matters. I’m perfectly happy to use ‘grammar’ in a broad sense which treats as offenses against grammar mistakes in usage like the conflation of ‘simple’ & ‘simplistic’, ‘flaunt’ & ‘flout’, ‘infer’ & ‘imply’ and so on. All these distinctions are useful ones to have. People should learn them and not mind being (gently) corrected when they get them wrong. But I think it’s also worth recognizing a narrower or stricter sense of grammar. By grammar proper or strictly so-called I have in mind the parts of speech and their functions, the verbal system of a language including the distinctions we call ‘tense’ (time), person and number (1st, 2nd 3rd, singular, plural), voice (active, passive), mood (indicative, subjunctive) . Knowing something about this is at least as important as good usage. It’s worth understanding how something as central to our humanity as language works–it’s also fascinating. Knowing something about it It can also help native speakers of one language learn other languages, help them help non native speakers learn the language of which they are native speakers and even occasionally, by making explicit one was is doing, help native speaker with their own language.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ken: Light touched it first, so retouching. I guess, my comment wasn’t as off topic as I thought.
Thanks!
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks, I hope I don’t actually do that, no medical insurance.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
My understanding is that “Latinx” was invented by queer Latinx people who wanted a word that explicitly didn’t assign a gender.
Ruckus
@MomSense:
Was it a dirt road?
Jim Appleton
@Ken: They is?? Why isn’t that correct?
Steeplejack
@Percysowner:
I don’t like alright instead of all right.
Barbara
@Roger Moore: I don’t really object to it, it just seems not to fit comfortably in either English or Spanish. Maybe that was the point . . .
JoyceH
@SiubhanDuinne:
That might also be British. I think the different word usages between USA English and British English are interesting – we’re ‘in the hospital’, whereas they’re ‘in hospital’. we call injections ‘shots’, while they use ‘jabs’. As for mathematics, we shorten to ‘math’, they shorten to ‘maths’.
Ruckus
@BC in Illinois:
Don’t we all?
J R in WV
@quakerinabasement:
Aren’t students tutored? I was a student when I used a math-lab tutor! For Calc 231 in summer school with a really lazy prof. Pretty math major grad student tutor saved that class/grade for me!
It was 5 hours in class all morning, 4 hours in math lab after class and lunch.
Steeplejack
@Fair Economist:
Precisely because it was “out of style” for over a hundred years. And there are a lot of things in Chaucer, Shakespeare and the King James Bible that we no longer use, if you taketh my point.
JoyceH
@Roger Moore:
The x is just odd, though, and I can’t off the top of my head think of another instance when it’s used. Especially when it’s supposed to be a separate syllable. Why not just Latinic?
Ken
@Jim Appleton: Prescriptively, singular they arguably should take “is”. Descriptively, everyone uses “are”.
JanieM
@JoyceH: Also “at the weekend” vs “on the weekend,” and “in hospital” vs “in the hospital.”
J R in WV
@opiejeanne:
Yes, unless Babish is going “Bing, bing, bing!” Then you can be binging with Babish. ;~)
ETA:
Grammar thread needs moar humor! [sic]
E.
Whiz for wiz. I lost the battle decades ago. Wiz = wizard. “She’s a math wiz.”
Steeplejack
@Bnad:
They should both give way to suddenly.
Jim Appleton
PS — Thank you Mistermix for this pedant festival. Might be good for a TBogg unit.
Jim Appleton
@Ken: You am correct, we believe’s.
Steeplejack
@Barbara:
Those “doublings” are also rhetorical flourishes that can serve as intensifiers. “The one and only Billy Shears . . .”
Cacti
My biggest grammar pet peeve:
Irregardless
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore:
They already have ‘Hispanic’, and it’s preferred by 61% of the population. I mostly see the term used by white people. The only time I remember hearing it out loud was when Elizabeth Warren said it during a debate. I think Psaki might have said it the other day too?
@Barbara: Support for ‘Hispanic’ actually goes up the longer the person’s family has been here and the more English they speak, from 57% to 72%. Among these same subgroups, Latinx goes from 2 to as high as… 7. It only hits double digits, and even then exactly 10%, among “people who have heard of it”, which is 23% of the Latino population.
Again, I think we should use the term people self-identify with, which for almost every Hispanic American is ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’. I was taught this rule of thumb growing up and I think it is a good one.
Would you use a neologism for the black community that only 3% of black Americans supported?
Steeplejack
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
Speaking of Manhattan, it seems like people in New York stand on line and everyone else stands in line.
no comment
@JustRuss:
Wildlife is dangerous.
Animals are dangerous.
Although, I like your “can be” solution best.
bemused senior
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: my daughter sings with a semi-professional choral group. They restarted in person practice and have been using masks designed for the SF opera for singers.
orsonk
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Same here. Annoying.
JML
I’d give real money for people to stop modifying “unique” or “historic”. These are binary states!
SiubhanDuinne
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Good luck at the interview!
JanieM
@E.: I think you lost the battle before you were born:
orsonk
One of my peeves: People using “learnings” when they mean “lessons.” I guess this is considered cool, contemporary, etc. Yeah, I’m old.
Steeplejack
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Good luck on that! Sounds right up your alley.
J R in WV
@WereBear:
Unless it’s a birthday party, or xmas, when you may well have another thing coming! Present #5, #6, etc… now I’m having fun with malapropisms!
cleek
@wizened_guy:
“try and” has been around since at least the early 1800s.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
It’s an awkward invention, and, as @Major^4 pointed out, hardly any Latins or Hispanics use it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks much
@Steeplejack: Thanks, it would allow for more career growth.
KSinMA
@Hungry Joe:
Dang! I fix those day in and day out in my job.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: I suspected as much. :-)
Steeplejack
One thing I’ve been seeing more of lately, even on the pundit shows, is got standing in for has/have got. “The Democrats got to get organized,” etc. Can’t think of another good example, but it’s up and coming.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Oh, wow! Photo retouching as in old school with a darkroom and everything?
Or with something like photoshop?
Surely you are a shoe-in!
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: You and I are correct. :-) It is in line.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack (phone):
I believe that would be The Hendrices.
:-)
Roger Moore
@JoyceH:
If I had to guess, I would say that “Latinx” was invented by people of Hispanic/Latinx background but who were native English speakers who didn’t really care how gender works in Spanish. But that’s just a guess.
Barbara
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Best of luck. Fingers crossed for you.
Westyny
“Nauseous” for “nauseated” nauseates me.
Steeplejack
@The Dangerman:
That’s wrong!
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I have the experience of taking a fun part of my life and turning it into a job. It allows me to say that I worked in professional sports but it also rather ruined the fun. It could have been some of the people involved rather than the job itself but still, the overall effect was negative for me. And yes some of the people made the job worthwhile.
I wish the best for you.
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack:
I think we’re on the same page. It’s a weird word that seems to have been seized on by the White media without a full understanding of its history or the way it’s seen in the community it’s alleged to describe.
SiubhanDuinne
@J R in WV:
From childhood (thus from memory):
A tutor who tooted the flute
Tried to teach two young tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor
“Is it harder to toot, or
To tutor two tooters to toot?”
:-)
Steeplejack
@JustRuss:
Wildlife is an “uncountable noun,” and thus singular. “Wildlife is . .”
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
Okay, this is another ambiguous one, like “toe/tow the line.” Is it “shoe-in” or “shoo-in”? I’ve seen both, but not sure I’ve ever bothered to research it. Off I go to the University of Google.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
Can’t find the article now, but I think it was a gringo queer group sticking their nose in.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WaterGirl: Digital retouching, so Photoshop. I’ll know more tomorrow, but just based on our short phone call, it sounds like a good deal of the base data is from scanned analog sources.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Barbara: Thanks.
FelonyGovt
Not really grammar, but I really cringe when I hear “heighth”, as in “length, width and heighth”.
J R in WV
Hey, BillIn, best of luck on your job interview. You can obviously make almost any photo look better without falsifying the content of the image. Hope they use software you’re familiar with. Keep us posted!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: Yeah, that’s a bit of a concern, but there’s also being paid to grow my skillset. I’ve actually done this before when I worked in IT professionally.
cope
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I hope you nail the interview, get the job and ditch the orange apron job. If they require a random, anonymous internet reference, I will gladly shoot them a text.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@J R in WV: They’re using Photoshop, so I do have some skills in application, but there’s a lot to know. Thanks much.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@cope: Thanks much.
gbbalto
@Montanareddog: Wait, “data is” instead of “data are”? Not that I don’t have to correct myself from using the former.
Miki
@Roger Moore: “A proper martini contains gin and vermouth, with optional ice and garnish.”
More specifically, olives. If your garnish is pickled onions, it’s a Gibson.
PST
@Scout211:
While we’re on the subject of medical pedantry here, I will toss in the difference between signs and symptoms, as related to me by some doctor in my distant past. Signs are observable by the medical professional, while symptoms are described by the patient. Feeling nauseated is a symptom, throwing up on the doctor’s shoes is a sign. Body aches are a symptom, a fever of 103 degrees is a sign. (My wife got her booster the other day so I’ve been hearing a lot about symptoms.)
Chris T.
@quakerinabasement:
A tutor who tooted the flute
Tutored two tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor,
“Is it harder to toot, or
To tutor two tooters to toot?”
Steeplejack
@E.:
Whiz has other roots besides wizard, according to the OED. It can denote someone who exhibits a flashy talent for something, which is different from wizard-like mastery.
Major Major Major Major
@JustRuss:
Don’t worry, there will be.
SiubhanDuinne
I thought at
440445 comments we would have pretty well exhausted this subject, but it seems to be inexhaustible! I just this minute (in a different forum) came across one that never fails to irk me: using “worthy” when “worthwhile” is meant, e.g., “This is a worthy article to read.” I would make the distinction “It is a worthwhile article — so much so that it is worthy of a Pulitzer.”J R in WV
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’ve been scanning a couple of bushels of family photos from as far back as the mid-1800s, and using Graphical Image Manipulation Program, a free Linux photo management system to clean some of them up, but only the tools that work on the whole image at once.
The photos started at my cousin’s house, came to my house, then his house burned, so we saved that bit of history from destruction. Have slacked off a whole lot on that assignment since Rona came to town…
Another Scott
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Excellent. Fingers crossed!
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
Shoo-in.
Which reminds me: someone is a “real trouper,” not a “real trooper.” It’s trouper as in a member of a performing cast, as in “the show must go on.” The descriptivists are especially craven on this one.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
?
GrueBleen
@Brant:
But, billy goat, butt: we’ve only taught grammar in schools for less than two centuries out of the about 200,000 years of human existence. We still have grammar though.
prostratedragon
If mass would help, let me fling my screaming self on loose/lose.
prostratedragon
@cmorenc: What is that comma doing there?!!!
Another Scott
@Ken: [snort!]
Well done.
Flammable/inflammable. “Janie’s skin was flamed.” (Never seen.)
“External Use Only – Inflammable” (Seen.)
There’s obviously a reason, but it must be maddening for people trying to figure out English (especially American English) for the first time.
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
Fortuitous vs. fortunate. Many people use the former when they mean the latter.
Roger Moore
@Miki:
I was thinking of a twist of lemon peel.
GrueBleen
@prostratedragon:
And why replace nice, short, simple from or off with the appalling “off of”
laura
So close to the Tbogg Unit! Keep it up Peoples- my contribution is the dash, I learn on it a lot at the expense of the correct comma or semi colon. But being a grammar scofflaw doesn’t stop me from grammar policing others.
cleek
@Steeplejack:
if i need someone to count on in a tough situation, i’ll take a trooper over a trouper.
say… why is it that prescriptionists don’t follow grammar texts written in the 1500s ? surely the language hasn’t … changed? are today’s grammar texts describing the language as it exists today instead of describing the language of Shakespeare and Lizze 1 ?
Steeplejack
I think my pedantry gland has been fully expressed. It was occluded for so long.
Ryan
Affect and effect.
Another Scott
@Steeplejack:
Are you sure you want the 3rd?:
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@GrueBleen:
Except for Chinese, which only has syntax.
*ducks shoes thrown by people who correctly note that this saying is untrue
Another Scott
@Steeplejack: It’s “aight” now. Much better.
Cheers,
Scott.
E.
@JanieM: No! Fake news! Your source is a woke website! It cannot be!
Meyermam
“Reason is because…” My mom would stop and correct me every time. “No, dear. The reason is not because. The reason is that…” She was fighting a losing battle.
E.
@Steeplejack: No, that would be the Second. Second is prescriptive, Third descriptive. I have both!
Roger Moore
@laura:
Part of the problem with punctuation is there isn’t enough of it. As I’ve pointed out before, the fundamental problem exposed by arguments about the Oxford comma is that the comma is doing double duty (list separator and setting off appositives) so it’s not clear from reading what function it’s serving in any case. What we really need is more punctuation marks so each can serve exactly one function without confusion. Of course it would help to have more vowel symbols for the same reason…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@J R in WV: Linux pretty well limits you to GIMP, though it’s not classed as a professional class app. I’ve used it a bit, it’s a bit clunky and doesn’t have near the stuff that Photoshop has.
@Another Scott: Thanks.
Chris T.
@JoyceH:
All true. And yet, Americans are “in school”, not “in the school”—except in some specific cases!
JanieM
@Chris T.: My son taught English in China for five years. We spent a long evening once, trying to find a clear pattern/rule to give his students for when to use “the” in phrases like that. We couldn’t, and it’s all the clearer if you bring in the differences between British and American usage
ETA: We also “go to church,” not to “the church,” unless we’re talking about a specific building, or “the Church”…….
Steeplejack
@cleek:
Language, like the law, changes over time, and, like the law, it is accompanied by interpretation, commentary and pedagogy, hopefully in the service of more precise communication. As an example . . .
That’s just it: the idiom is not about your having someone to count on; it’s a description of a person’s grit, determination and stamina to see something through. By making trooper interchangeable with trouper, you have actually lost some precision of meaning.
Also, the whole “Hyuk-hyuk, but Shakespeare!” thing is really tired.
Chris T.
@JanieM: I think it relates to how many of these we expect to find in any given town or other local area. Medical care in the US has historically been terrible, so there is only ever one hospital, hence in “the hospital”; schools, however, have been common enough that you’re in whichever school takes your grades or subdivision of the town. Churches … well, with so many different denominations that there are four per city block, of course you have your pick.
Steeplejack
@Another Scott:
You work with the dictionary you’ve got, not the one you wish you had. Feel free to suggest an alternative.
Steeplejack
@Another Scott:
Tsk, now you’re misappropriating AAVE. For shame.
Mo MacArbie
I have said “all of the sudden” my entire life. I have never heard of “all of a sudden”. What does that even mean? If there’s only one sudden, why do you need to specify all of it? ;-)
One peeve I do notice is words that are compound as nouns but separate as a verb phrase morphing into the one word in both instances. I can’t think of any good examples off the top of my head though. Feedback feeds back, it does not feedback.
cleek
@Steeplejack:
what’s “it” (the idiom, the words, the rules) is what people say and understand it to be. human language does not even exist outside of that framework.
stomp your foot all you like, write as many rules as you like, but people are going to use the language as they see fit.
and prescriptivists will write new rules based on what they see happening, and humans will go on stomping on those rules, if they impair communication.
stinger
Late to the thread, but “comprise” means “takes together”. The whole comprises its parts; the parts do not comprise the whole. Nothing is “comprised of”. There are so many available words that people DO know how to use correctly — constitute, is composed of, consists of — but I suppose using “comprise” makes them feel edumacated.
Also, why aren’t children taught how to hold a pencil or pen correctly? Even young adults now grip it as if it were a jumbo crayon. No wonder they find writing by hand so difficult. Just pinch it with the thumb and forefinger and rest it on/guide it with the knuckle of the middle finger.
Starboard Tack
@Taken4Granite: Favorite (supposed) Yogi story. Someone asked him in Spring Training what his hat size was. “I don’t know. I’m not in shape yet.”
Steeplejack (phone)
@Mo MacArbie:
By contrast, I’ve never heard “all of the sudden”; it has always been “all of a sudden.”
This reminds me of “step foot in a room” vs. “set foot in a room” (or wherever, obviously). I’ve always heard and read the latter, but lately I’ve been seeing the former.
Barbara
@Mo MacArbie: Reprising one of my favorite kid’s books of all time, “Suddenly!” is a synonym that can be used for either expression. Modern usage mostly limits “sudden” to its status as an adjective, but I looked it up, and it can be used as a noun, which use is apparently now archaic except in the expression “all of a sudden” or “all of the sudden,” however you say it. I think “a” is more grammatically familiar but I think both would be correct — like “All of a long summer’s day” versus “All of the long summer’s day.”
TriassicSands
@Steeplejack:
It’s been “all right” and “already” until fairly recently. Now, I see “alright” all the time. There are a lot of forces at work.
1. Young people don’t learn grammar and language is generally devalued.
2. Typing on phones and tablets and using various messaging systems where shortening everything is common including attention spans.
3. Talking heads on TV, radio, and movies, where the text is often written by younger people — see 1 & 2.
And more…
3. S
Miki
@Roger Moore: A twist never does it for me. Salt/umami makes it feel like a complete meal. Cheers!
Barbara
@stinger:
Do you want another 500 comments? The short answer is, schools go to the end of the earth to make sure every kid learns to read but “penmanship” has vanished because they figure everyone is headed to a keyboard. Yes, it makes me want to weep because a keyboard isn’t the same, but one of my kids had physical difficulty with writing and I mostly got the big heave ho when I tried to engage the school about it. It happened more than six years ago and it still makes me angry when I think about it.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: Now that you say that, I’m pretty sure you are right. So I looked it up:
stinger
@stinger: I should have known that this topic would tbogg the thread.
Steeplejack (phone)
@stinger:
Now you’ve jinxed it.
jimmiraybob
Media: “That’s incredible!”
Me: Come back when you’ve got something credible.
SiubhanDuinne
This is an actual reader comment in the most recent Charles P. Pierce thread. The writer checks many of the boxes we’ve identified here, and I’m pretty sure he’s not trying to be cute or ironic.
Copied/pasted in its entirety:
I’m not even kidding.
ETA: I must be wrong. The more I look at this, the more I am coming to believe this is a deliberate spoof on the writer’s part. But we are at such a pass in 2021 that I can’t be certain.
Steeplejack (phone)
@SiubhanDuinne:
I heard a soundtrack like a pinball machine as I read that. Theme: “Grammar police—to correct and serve!”
CapnMubbers
Forward to a book instead of Foreword.
Sight instead of cite a reference.
Forecasted.
Many which have already been covered.
A friend texted me that “Staci (her daughter) called me ballin…” It took me a second to realize that daughter was upset.
PJ
@Major Major Major Major:
“Business Skills”, or whatever it was called, in high school, was probably the most useful class I took, because I learned how to type in it.
JanieM
@SiubhanDuinne: I agree with your afterthought that it looks a lot like a spoof. It’s a little too consistent in the type of errors, and they come a little too relentlessly. Also, the sentence structure is pretty good for someone who would make all those other errors.
Jim Appleton
Just hanging out here to note I predicted a TBogg unit.
Are there any Jackals who don’t know what a TBogg unit is?
Frances
“One of the only” – the only one, or one of the few?
Autocorrection of the day “a social piranha”
stinger
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Wishing you good luck!
Jim Appleton
We
Jim Appleton
Were
stinger
@Steeplejack:
Though an American, I prefer the spelling “judgement”.
Jim Appleton
So
Jim Appleton
Close
Amir Khalid
@Roger Moore:
The only bit of writing advice worth a damn from Strunk & White is “Omit needless words”. All the rest can be safely ignored.
WaterGirl
@Jim Appleton: I hope you’re happy! :-)
Steeplejack (phone)
@Jim Appleton:
It could be decertified because you padded it!
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
I think they have some additional good advice, like avoiding dialect unless you have an ear for it.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Amir Khalid, @Roger Moore:
And of course the hard part is figuring out which are the needless words.
Jim Appleton
@WaterGirl: I yam. Peace.
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
For years and years, I had a sign above my desk: “ESCHEW OBFUSCATION.”
But I never paid much attention to it.
SiubhanDuinne
@Roger Moore:
Although I’ve lived in Georgia for 40+ years in the aggregate, I’ll never be a true Southerner, and if I attempt to use local/regional dialect I usually just sound silly. That said, there are a couple of regionalisms which I find quite useful and expressive.
Of a person besieged by bad luck: Can’t win fer losing.
Of something or someone irritatingly insignificant: Don’t pay [it/him] no nevermind.
Scout211
@SiubhanDuinne:
I lived in New Orleans while I was in grad school in the 70s. I loved learning all the regionalisms there, many that originated from French.
If I needed food for dinner I had to “make the groceries.”
And if someone was having a birthday, they were “making [ ] years old.” Or if they recently had a birthday, they “just made [ ] years old.”
I wish I could remember more of them.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: My sign says: BEFORE YOU SPEAK
is it True?
is it Helpful?
is it Inspiring?
is it Necessary?
is it Kind?
The ‘necessary’ part is the one that sometimes saves me from saying something that would be better off left unsaid.
No, it’s not necessary, dammit! But I really want to say it.
Amir Khalid
I keep a sizeable herd of English-grammar peeves. One of the biggest among them is the practice of passive-voice shaming, particularly when done by someone who mistakenly thinks they have spotted a passive construction. The passive voice is by itself not wrong or bad, and weak or clumsy sentence construction doesn’t necessarily mean it’s passive. People, a passive construction must use the past participle of a verb e.g. “it was stolen“. It’s only bad when used to evade naming the guilty party that did a bad deed, e.g. when you fail to say “it was stolen by the gremlins.”
Speaking of past participles, it also bugs me when I hear/read “He has went” in the perfect tenseinstead of “he has gone”.
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
That’s why I gave the possibility that it might not be all the job itself. Too long a story and while I doubt that any of them read BJ it’s possible so I’m just going to say that turning your hobby into a full time job can be good, I met some great people and some not nearly so great, so the people might possibly be considered about normal. I’m glad I did it, I’m also glad I left when I did. Also understand, a good part of my job life, I was in charge and owned the company so any comparison to someone else’s life may be crap.
Yutsano
No one acknowledged the T-bogg?
Okay…I’m going to be the contrarian here. While some of these do grate on me, I’ve learned to live with them. There are two main reasons why.
A) I used to be a lot more rigid about grammar, syntax, etc. Then I got into linguistics on YouTube. And the biggest thing to learn is that languages change. Sometimes those changes are really slow. Sometimes they’re rapid. What we might be witnessing is just dialectical and may change back (or even more!) in the next 50 years. We don’t know. But to me it’s kind of exciting.
B) More than a few of the changes here are derived from African American Vernacular English. A lot of this has bled in from the embrace of rap music and Black culture especially since the 1980s. So that also means elements of AAVE would start bleeding into the language as it gets embraced by the youths of those eras as they get older. Again, it’s the way languages change, especially as the North American dialects get incorporated as we get more multicultural. Some grammar, syntax, and vocabulary changes are inevitable. It’s similar to the prominence of Español in the Southwest. Heck even the embrace on this top 10,000 blog of ¿por que no los dos? demonstrates how it bled in here AND WE JUST EMBRACED IT!!!
Our language is going to change. I’m all here for it.
Jim Appleton
@Yutsano: I first predicted the TBogg hours ago, then jammed it, then saluted WaterGirl for humoring me.
laura
Celebrating the Tbogg Unit? and the juicy subject that made it all possible. Good job peoples ?
Ruckus
@Yutsano:
You also have TV to blame or thank, because it has opened up differing linguistics a lot. We get a chance to see and hear someone else, quite possibly speaking the same language but with a far, far different dialect. Those differences are lessoned with exposure to a more common/central way of speaking.
Anoniminous
@Steeplejack (phone):
May you die the death of a thousand camels running over your tongue.
Jim Appleton
@Yutsano: one of my favorites is “skosh” from the Japanese sukoshi.
Jazzman
It’s surprising how many supposedly well-educated people still can’t figure out the difference between its and it’s. To me, seeing that incorrect usage in a post is like crunching a grain of sand in your sandwich, or not being able to ignore a bit of bright green spinach in a speaker’s teeth.
It’s – contraction of “it is”, “it has”, etc.
Its – possessive, meaning “belonging to it”.
If you’re not sure which form to use, try substituting “it is”. If the result doesn’t sound right, it isn’t right.
One of the things I love about Balloon Juice comments is that they’re primarily text. The commentariat of this blog is obviously made up largely of well-read people (as evidenced by the number of comments on and prolonged thread life of this post). No comparison to the subliterate ranting found at sites like Reddit and Youtube!
Timill
@Jazzman: Hi’s, Her’s and It’s are not possessives…
JanieM
@Bill Dunlap: Thread is probably dead, but I thought “third world” came into use during the Cold War in relation to the West, the Soviet bloc, and everyone else, basically.
…..
Which is what Wikipedia says.
(Not actually a) Dr. Thoth Evans
@opiejeanne:
You mean James Nicoll
Royston Vasey
This. “I could care less” is a personal bugbear of mine
Frosty Fred
@Frosty Fred:
Late getting back, but I’ve remembered I was thinking of Cold Comfort Farm, not a Wimsey novel. Still British and published 1932.
Tehanu
I can’t understand why people insist on writing “comma, however, comma.” Example: “We delivered the service, however, we failed to obtain the signature.”
glc
This is a long thread. I’ll just comment that to my mind this is not an issue of grammar, which more properly refers to syntax and morphology than to semantics.
But it does fall squarely within the purview of the copy editor.
Have an ice day.
mardam
|You’ve got another thing coming”. Instead of the correct, “You’ve got another think coming”.
The saying is actually only the second part of the whole thing. If you think that, you’ve got another think coming. But people never use the first sentence, and mishear the second. Despite what Judas Priest says.
sab
@Tehanu: I think it is because however has two meanings. In your sentence the second comma isn’t needed to clarify which, but some teacher a long time ago probably pounded the rule into them.
Brachiator
I hate that every group, assemblage and organization must be designated a “community” as though it is some kind of natural tribe or family. When I read stories about the “intelligence community,” it makes my teeth hurt. Do these people all live and eat in the same dormitory?
And then there is the assumption that everyone must be assigned to a community, and can only truly belong to one community.