I hate it when people get "to" and "too" wrong, it happens way too much online. I'm no pedant, but it really gets on my nerves.
Poor grammar angers me Ants that drift off the path, and cause everyone else to wander, drive me insane Excessively compressed jpg images often trigger an involuntary release Reposts are the reason why half my hair has been pulled out and my bin is full of broken monitors
I'm Indian, so my spelling should be British (colour, not color) but years off FF and MS Office (and being too lazy to change the dictionary) have ruined me. I lost 10 points off every English exam I ever took because of spellings.
Why not? I've never been ashamed of being a pedant. I think it's great. My pet peeve: unnecessary or misused commas and periods. Oh, they drive me insane. And non-capitalization, and swapping of exclamation marks and question marks. People writing things like durr, how do i form sentense! (Non-English-speakers are excluded from that mockery. Native English-speakers - you have no excuse.)
What's really getting on my nerves lately is that bad grammar and spelling are moving in to business. Part of the work I do is through email. I opened my email this morning to find a request in full "text-speak". "Pl c attchd. Nd acct for new emp. Tks!" It's pure laziness and inappropriate for business, really.
Oh I second that! I am from Denmark so English is not my native language, but even I know how to do that. Actually it seems to me that most of the people who make that error are native English speakers?
For starters, putting a space between the end of your sentence and the question mark And I am apparently too lazy to read your post Yeah, it's just ignorance. They spell it the way it's pronounced without knowing any better, while if they thought about it for a second they would realise it doesn't make any sense. Personally, I think it's understandable to expect lower standards on grammar on the Internet, and if it's just one or two sentences then it doesn't really bother me. I don't do it because I apparently have OCD (which is why I'll always edit my posts if I see any mistakes). But when I see a wall of text without any thought put into formatting or correct grammar usage the chances are I'm not going to bother reading it, because it takes twice as long to read as a well written post. It's common courtesy more than anything, and the more people get used to doing it on the Internet, the more it creeps into every form of written communication. My friends often laugh at me because I go to the effort of spelling out every word in texts instead of using txt spk. That's also why I hate Twitter.
What bothers me is "I've got a cat". If you were previously in possession of the cat and are now stating that it continues to be in your possession then you would be better off phrasing your sentence as: "I've a cat" as a contraction of "I have a cat". If you were not previously in possession of a cat, but have recently aquired one, then you would be correct to say: "I got a cat". In the sentence "I've got a cat", "have" and "got" cannot possibly both apply to "cat" because they are mutually exclusive situations with regards to prior ownership of the cat. "Have" must be applying to "got", yet that is also illogical. This leads to the sentence "I've got a cat" meaning that the speaker may not indeed have a cat, but is rather in possession of (he/she has) the action of recieving a cat (getting a cat). One cannot possess an action. The sentence is a fallacy. At best, one could argue that "have" only pertains to current possession. This would allow both "have" and "got" to apply to "cat" concurrently, yet would still make one of the words redundant.
Interesting. I have not considered this, and I'm sure I've made the error myself numerous times. You have added to my knowledge and understanding of the english language good sir. My thanks to you.
The problem with colour and color is that CSS/HTML/etc demands the american spelling, and ignores the proper spelling. Somehow I've managed to program my head to move between the two as needed but it is still a bit stupid. You would think that they would allow either spelling! I know its not exactly the theme of this thread, but I have a bit of a pet hate for anglicised words. For instance I dislike calling my other half my "fiance" because: 1) I know that in french I've completely misspelt the word, and it makes me feel stupid for using it. 2) There's a perfectly good english word for the same thing.
Glad to see this thread, I'm a bit of a grammar nazi, although I'm somewhat dyslexic and definitely not perfect. One that gets me is that no one uses whom any more, it's not hard to figure out, you just need to re-arrange the sentence or answer the question using the words he/she/they/him/her/them instead of who. If the who gets replaced by he/she/they then it's who, if it get's replaced by him/her/them then it should be whom. For example, using the classic friends quote referring to secret Santas, the question is: "Who gets who?" The answer would be along the lines of "He gets Her", which is why Ross corrects it as "Who gets Whom?"
One I keep hearing a lot is "I'm sat..." I occasionally catch myself saying it and follow it with a swift reprimand! I'm no grammar genius but that one annoys me, especially when I say it.
"its" and "it's" is my pet hate. Many people confuse the two because we're repeatedly told in school that " 's " is used as a possessive indicator. "its" is the exception to that rule. "it's" should *only* be used to shorten "it is" or "it has", there are no other uses. "its" was solely created to indicate possession, so adding an apostrophe is redundant.