Grammar Glitches?

One of my pet peeves is misspelling "grammar". I'm used to it as I realize that many people type as poorly as I do. Yet GRAMMER irks me!

LOL, I think that my own is Grammar. But only in my writing. Syntax definitely ranks second.

Another pet peeve is the lowly apostrophe. I wish whaever idiot ever decided that we needed it for plural at anytime would have to grade 50000 papers and mark every single one of them.

Charlotte, my pet peeve has to be run-on sentences that never get to the point and change tense and topics all over the place and just keep adding in "and" until the whole thing reads like a paragraph instead of a sentence and sometimes they even change the subject and it almost becomes a novella before they finally put a period on it. (LOL)

a lot of things get me, spelling not so much but mixing tenses is annoying

My issue has to do with collective noun and verb agreement. For example, Manchester United Football Club is a name that I thought should be considered a collective noun phrase. It is often shortened to Man U. But all sportscasters say phrases like, "Man U have a big match ahead."
Why isn't it Man U has a big match ahead?

Several thing's bother me, but I would have to agree with you, Charlotte -- the apostrophe's on plural noun's are really obnoxious. Why do people's think they need them?

The use of double negatives. It drives me crazy!

I get mad at myself actually when I go back and read what I have miss spelled.

I am horrible at punctuation...and English was my worst subject....please forgive me if I offend your senses.

Shaunee: Me, too. I also leave out words.

All of the above.

I hate to see alot together and I hate to see the little i all alone.

I can't stand it when people say "me and Bob" or "her and me". It drives me crazy! I also can't stand it when people say "good" instead of "well" and when someone says "drive safe" instead of "safely". My grandmother's voice always pops into my head, correcting it!

My biggest problem is knowing when to use "its" versus "it's." And it really irks me when adults don't use capitals and don't spell words out like "u" instead of "you."

A [space] LOT. Two words. Get used to it.

My partner explodes when people (like me) misuse "bring" and "take."
"Bring this letter to the postoffice" WRONG!

Umar, the problem with collective noun/verb agreement is that the rules are different in England and the US. Here "Man U has...," is correct. In Britain collectives are treated otherwise and "Man U have...," is correct.

As for my peeve: it's using an apostrophe to turn a singular noun ending in S into a possessive ("Charles' pet peeve," for example.) According to Strunk and White it should be Charles's pet peeve.

However, I realize I'm on shaky ground here. The Elements of Style is only one style guide and others disagree. Some newspaper style books would say "Charles' annoying pet peeve." I'm on shakier ground (a veritable earth quake) in that another of my peeves is peevish usage prescribers. I'd rather we watch how the language is used than rail at its users.

Wow. These are all good. All of mine have been named... but if I think of another one I'll come back.
; )

The biggest problem I have when editing my own work is thinking I see what I intended to write not what was produced by my head to hand coordination.

Use spell checking, please! It's free on the Google tool bar and easy to use. I sometimes have trouble with the run on sentences. Not knowing if I should stop and start another sentence or just "comma" it and continue on. Using nouns as verbs also bothers me. lol C):-)

There's probably no excuse for misspelled words since we now have spell check.

It's like homophone abuse only not quite, the use of a word that sounds similar to the word that should be used. E. g. "Honing in on the target." Close, but it should be "Homing in." I'll have to watch TV news so I can be reminded of some more. There's a bunch. Sometimes it's extended to entire phrases like "kick start" for "jump start."

I'm irritated by people who have no clue about past participles, but I have to laugh at myself for it, because I know that it's part of the process called regularization in language, where irregular forms are converted to regular ones. In my part of the US everyone says "I have went" instead of "I have gone" and lots and lots of others. Those of us who worked to learn the right forms struggle to accept such sloppiness, and I'm also sad that "are" and "were" are disappearing fast, replaced by "is" and "was." If I live the long life I hope for, my language will have to change or isolate me as a product of an ancient time.

what they call 'chat speak' that is the most annoying.. the whole 'lolz u r jst jealus tht i can tlk lk ths ^^ ' and just.. misspelling when more than half the people that misspell their words are old enough to KNOW BETTER D:

Charlotte - don't be upset - I'm going to delete this article from THEATER Community (because it's not a theater article)
BUT
first I want to say - YAY, CHARLOTTE - grammar! YES!

My pettest peeve is the horrid trend of misplacing apostrophes. So many folks are apostrophizing plurals (WRONG!) and some are even ignoring contractions! This thing is contagious, apparently - it's running rampant through signage and emails.

When people say between you and I.

...how about "your" in place of "you're?" or "there" in place of "their?" or "to" in place of "too?"...

I have trouble trying to decide where a comma should be used or if one should be used at all. I have read the rules regarding commas but I'm still in trouble!

With the exception of the use of colloquial speech, or as April labelled it, "chat speak" most of the above errors mention above are always wrong. Colloquial speech on the other hand may sometimes be appropriate even if it is grammatically incorrect.

What I find a more interest line of inquiry is why some errors happen? It is not always a matter of an author not knowing better. I am among those who lets misplaced apostrophes get into articles and comments, and I don't really know why it happens. It's not like I don't know when an apostrophe should and shouldn't be used. The same with "to" and "too", although that could just be a matter of not holding down the "o" key a bit too long or not long enough.

I do think a lot of errors are committed due to the little quirks in our brain as can happen with homophones. In very that brief interval between thinking the right word and sending instructions to our fingers there is what my daughter labels a brain fart and something complete unintended happens.

Even using a spell checker is no guarantee that a misspelling will not get into print. Google's spell checker is a nice tool for use with online entries, but it is of no help if you forget to do a spell check before hitting the post or publish button. Then there is the problem of clicking on the wrong word in the list of alternatives.

Lastly, a lot of errors get past us because of the problem I mentioned in my earlier comment. Ideally an author should never have to proofread their own work because we tend to see what we thought we wrote, but there is rarely someone else around to proofread stuff that is being written online.

Big peeve: people who misuse a word because they don't exactly know what it means. An example, similar to Nippy's "hone or home" above: saying "infer" instead of "imply" (because it sounds more la-di-dah, I guess). They are opposites!

there and their

misuse of whom

"This is a picture of Bob and I." It's ME, not I!

"Grammar, Spellling, Syntax, Punctuation? Something else?"

Well, since you asked. I am not a fan of incomplete sentences.

I also regret that internet and IM usage have created a new breed of lazy typists who no longer use upper case letters and punctuation.

I used to be bothered, but with all the real crap in my life..this is something I could care less about anymore. My 18 year old is the grammar police in my house.

Chatspeak is the big peeve of mine. It's one thing to get a text message that says "RU cmng 2 the party?" It's quite another to get a query from a potential writer that begins, "im intrstd in riting 4 ur site."

The word "very" irks me. I think it goes back to a high school English teacher who would insist on us avoiding the word. He said it was a vocubulary limited, a word that let you avoid using other words. "The air was very cold. Amy was very sad that she had to wait in the cold for Rob. She was very worried about him, because he always arrived very early."

Makes my skin crawl!

The careless errors bother me, those glaring spelling or grammar mistakes that just pop off the page. You must proofread your work.

There isn't much that really irks me. I don't read through articles looking for mistakes. I figure that everyone is human.

I am more irritated about pronunciation. I can usually look past the apostrophe in the wrong spot or the Who or Whom errors when they're written, but I can't stand hearing someone say "supposbly" instead of supposedly! Irks me to no end!! It is the equivalent to nails on a chalkboard! That is one example, and I know there are others.. I just can't think of them right now.

Thanks for all the excellent examples. As I noted earlier, my typing is not as good as my spelling, and my proofing is often worse than my typing. I have noticed that there are usually only a few errors that people make in formal (school) writing, and those may be due to those brain glitches that Carol mentioned above.

I do know that reading aloud helps, and simplifying helps, and being aware that it makes a difference to the audience helps.

The one that drives me nuts more than any other, and that I've been seeing more and more over the years, is the use of the word "then" instead of the correct "than." That makes me want to scream! My own biggest problem is probably my tendency toward sloppy typing and forgetting to proofread. Oh, and being verbose.

I thought Strunk and Wagnalls gave us a choice?

The English disease is infecting American sports as our nascent soccer announcers try and peg the Brits. So you'll now hear, "The LA Galaxy have a big game tonight..."

I do a lot of editing. What bothers me the most are people who use mixed rhetorical patterns. Most other grammar mistakes are fairly easy to correct.

I really hate it when people in my part of the country say things like; get off or on the car. They don't realize that you would be sitting on the car, like the hood or trunk. They also say; turn off my cigarette. It's so annoying. When we went up north, they would say things like; go with. I always asked, go with what? I wasn't being a jerk, I really wanted to know. I had never heard someone say that before. It's like waiting for the rest of the sentence. Different parts of the country have some weird sayings.

A friend of mine pegged me on my use of metaphor today. I am from NC, and she is from GA, and you'd think our slang would be nearly the same. Not so, Grasshopper. We are learning to use well-detailed analogy because the quick metahor does not carry the message. It does not help that we did not watch the same TV shows as kids.

My pet peeve is the assumption that conversational language is the same as formal writing - I remember when the trend in teaching was to correct the writing but NEVER, EVER correct their speech because their way of speaking was their cultural heritage and teachers have no right to disturb that structure. What guff! With things the way they are these days, a person with a 4.0 GPR and a mouth like a sewer or undeveloped beyond rap-like lyrics would in all likelihood not get the job, acceptance to college, looked upon favorably by the person's parents as a desired date or be chosen as a spokesperson for a cause that might be a true calling. Different language for different situations is not a bad idea but the ability to know the venues and adjust does seem to be. Grammar is not negotiable in the true sense - there are rules and more rules - and following the rules is the mark of a person who wants to be accepted in most of life's situations and most assuredly in the world of writing.

In my writing and perhaps diction also, tense and being too verbose (wordy rather than simple) is my biggest hang-up ! Thanks for this piece . . .
grammar 102