What are your grammar bugbears?
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Abberant apostrophes (and missing ones).
Sentences that miss out words for no reason: e.g. "A couple things" vs. "A couple of things".
Confusing envy and jealousy.
The above is a personal list; I don't get judgemental about others' grammar but I do cringe internally.
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When people pretend they cannot understand a sentence becuse of a grammatical error.
If you honestly can't parse out what a person is trying to say because they left out a comma or misspelled a word or God forbid used the wrong "their" perhaps you need to work on reading skills.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I'm sorry, but, without commas, this is just a mess, and I'm not going to torture myself into reading it.
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When people pretend they cannot understand a sentence becuse of a grammatical error.
If you honestly can't parse out what a person is trying to say because they left out a comma or misspelled a word or God forbid used the wrong "their" perhaps you need to work on reading skills.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Or they can't figure out typos where one letter is just an adjacent key and the sentence makes it obvious.
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A wall of text with no punctuation.
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Mine is petty, but is due to having an internal voice when I read. When commonly used words are misspelled, like using loose instead of lose, I 'hear' it pronounced as spelled and it drives me nuts. Homophones like their and there don't annoy me nearly as much.
I also mispronounce words learned from reading that don't follow normal phonetic patterns that I'm used to, like melee, so I do understand why people mix up loose and lose. It is still painful to read.
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Resistance to shifting grammar annoys me.
Educated linguists know really well that language changes over time. It is natural and expected. There are also living valid variations of grammar outside standardized "book" grammar.
People who are zero educated just go with whatever.
People who are half educated juuuust enough to be smartasses but not enough to be smart will say shit like "I don't know, can you?" in response to "Can I go to the bathroom". Or pretend an emphasized negation - aka double negative - can be interpreted as a positive.
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I understand it's controversial, but people who don't put the final comma in a list before "and" which then groups the final two items as one erroneously.
Also, when people put a space before a comma. I'm not sure why they do that, but it's cemented in some people's brains who speak fluent English from childhood onward.
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Abberant apostrophes (and missing ones).
Sentences that miss out words for no reason: e.g. "A couple things" vs. "A couple of things".
Confusing envy and jealousy.
The above is a personal list; I don't get judgemental about others' grammar but I do cringe internally.
Are you jealous people who aren;t bothered by those errors?
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When people pretend they cannot understand a sentence becuse of a grammatical error.
If you honestly can't parse out what a person is trying to say because they left out a comma or misspelled a word or God forbid used the wrong "their" perhaps you need to work on reading skills.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]The brain generates a characteristic signal (from a sub-region of Broca’s area) when it detects grammatical errors—but it generates an identical signal when you’re listening to a grammatical sentence and need to re-parse it partway through. I think this latter case is actually the real purpose of the signal: every time it triggers, your brain is warning you that you need to stop and check the sentence again even if the meaning seems unambiguous. So the “pretending they can’t understand you” reaction could just be a reflexive response to that signal (i.e., the brain is telling them it’s confused even if there’s no logical reason it should be).
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Pronouncing familiar as fermiliar.
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I understand it's controversial, but people who don't put the final comma in a list before "and" which then groups the final two items as one erroneously.
Also, when people put a space before a comma. I'm not sure why they do that, but it's cemented in some people's brains who speak fluent English from childhood onward.
The Oxford comma! I am also a fan.
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i have than more we can always never listen to
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The Oxford comma! I am also a fan.
I sign this as well. It’s literally a character difference and there is no ambiguity at all. There is no downside.
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Resistance to shifting grammar annoys me.
Educated linguists know really well that language changes over time. It is natural and expected. There are also living valid variations of grammar outside standardized "book" grammar.
People who are zero educated just go with whatever.
People who are half educated juuuust enough to be smartasses but not enough to be smart will say shit like "I don't know, can you?" in response to "Can I go to the bathroom". Or pretend an emphasized negation - aka double negative - can be interpreted as a positive.
Regarding double negatives, I get what you are saying, but they absolutely can be interpreted as a positive - this is easily proven by simply reversing one of them, and they can be reversed because they are after all negatives.
But if the speaker's meaning is clear then of course it's rude and incorrect to misinterpret them.
I feel like there's a gray area though where some constructions may be genuinely ambiguous which way the speaker meant (since a double negative as negative by definition means the opposite of what the words would mean otherwise) -
The brain generates a characteristic signal (from a sub-region of Broca’s area) when it detects grammatical errors—but it generates an identical signal when you’re listening to a grammatical sentence and need to re-parse it partway through. I think this latter case is actually the real purpose of the signal: every time it triggers, your brain is warning you that you need to stop and check the sentence again even if the meaning seems unambiguous. So the “pretending they can’t understand you” reaction could just be a reflexive response to that signal (i.e., the brain is telling them it’s confused even if there’s no logical reason it should be).
iamverysmart
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This cafe
I mean I try not to be a dick about spelling and grammar and stuff these days, but come on!
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Abberant apostrophes (and missing ones).
Sentences that miss out words for no reason: e.g. "A couple things" vs. "A couple of things".
Confusing envy and jealousy.
The above is a personal list; I don't get judgemental about others' grammar but I do cringe internally.
The apostrophe thing really grinds my gears. Especially “it’s” vs “its”. It’s not very hard, “it’s” is a contraction meaning “it is”. Otherwise, it’s possessive. This homonym is its own worst enemy.
I hate that “jealousy” has devoured “envy”. “Language is fluid”, they always say, but those two words have very different meanings!
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I get hung up on i.e. vs e.g. I'm not sure this counts as grammar though...
I also understand the meaning is not very known so many people confuse the two but I wish it was overall well understood so that the message is very clear.E.g. is used when enumerating examples, it doesn't have to include all possibilities. Like saying "for example..."
I.e. is to demonstrate exactly what we are talking about. It's like saying "by that I mean this".
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The apostrophe thing really grinds my gears. Especially “it’s” vs “its”. It’s not very hard, “it’s” is a contraction meaning “it is”. Otherwise, it’s possessive. This homonym is its own worst enemy.
I hate that “jealousy” has devoured “envy”. “Language is fluid”, they always say, but those two words have very different meanings!
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I hate that “jealousy” has devoured “envy”. “Language is fluid”, they always say, but those two words have very different meanings!
You'll have to hate the Greeks for that then, because the usage of Ancient Greek ζῆλος (zêlos, from which we get both of the doublets "jealous" and "zealous") already overlapped with what we now call "envy", and this overlap was borrowed into Latin as zelosus (which still overlapped with the native Latin word invidiosus that became envy), and thence into Old French jalous, which continued to overlap with envie.
That is to say, as far back as we can trace, jealous has always also meant envious, and they've coexisted in that manner since at least Classical Latin.
As with most of the obnoxiously pedantic "facts" about language in threads like this one, this supposed "distinction" is recent, artificial, and only exists to give those in the know a false sense of superiority over those without the "secret knowledge". The secret knowledge is usually (as it is in this case) literally wrong, but all that matters to them, of course, is that they have a reason to think of themselves as better than other people.
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Abberant apostrophes (and missing ones).
Sentences that miss out words for no reason: e.g. "A couple things" vs. "A couple of things".
Confusing envy and jealousy.
The above is a personal list; I don't get judgemental about others' grammar but I do cringe internally.
See my comment here about why there is no such thing as confusing envy and jealousy, because "jealousy" has always included the meaning of envy for at least the past 2500 years.
