Random Grammatical Rant
Tip It!Call me a snob, but it bugs the crap out of me when people write by ear and end up butchering the English language. Case in point: it’s “SHOULD HAVE” (or SHOULD’VE), not “SHOULD OF.” As in: “I should HAVE (or should’ve) written about this sooner.” The same goes for “could have” and “would have.” While I’ve run across a bunch of other cases like this in my meanderings across the web, this is the one that comes to mind right now. Again, I know that I’m running the risk of being a grammar snob by writing this, but if nobody ever told you, then how would you know? Now you do. Feel free to leave a comment with any other grammatical annoyances that you’ve run across. I now return you to the regularly scheduled programming.
Published on August 2nd, 2005 - 15 Comments
Filed under: Off Topic
About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!
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August 2nd, 2005 at 12:14 pm
“Could/should of” is one of the most irksome grammatical muckups to me, as well. So many others… it’s vs. its, for example. That’s one’s not just on blogs, it’s everywhere in professionally published media, too.
August 2nd, 2005 at 1:58 pm
Its vs. it’s bugs me too, as well as other misuses of possessives.
Another is “alright.” It’s spelled “all right,” without exception. All right?
August 2nd, 2005 at 6:26 pm
Another pet peeve of mine is the improper usage of “i.e.” and “e.g.” The former is short for “id est,” which means “that is.” The latter is short for “exempli gratia,” which means “for example.” But in everyday usage, these get flip-flopped all the time.
August 2nd, 2005 at 7:00 pm
irregardless.
The all time biggest offender. The word you want is “regardless”, people.
And innapropriate use of double quotes to make a point. Especially if you wiggle four fingers when you do it.
August 2nd, 2005 at 7:58 pm
Oh, one other one .. “every day” vs. “everyday.” As in, “I try to post every day, but the everyday advice can get repetitive.”
August 3rd, 2005 at 8:17 am
And “alot” is not a word! A person may have a lot of money but they cannot have “alot” of money.
August 3rd, 2005 at 8:30 am
I always loved this example from The Elements of Style– about nauseous vs. nauseated. It went something like “don’t say that you feel nauseous, unless you are sure you have that effect on others…”
August 11th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
Personally, I despise the use of “definiately” and “was” in place of the contrafactual “were.”
August 21st, 2005 at 11:54 am
My favorite is “flounder” and “founder”. Flounder is a fish, and founder is to drift aimlessly. But over usage of “flounder” with the meaning of “founder” has almost eradicated the difference.
August 28th, 2005 at 1:57 pm
If I see one more person use “do” instead of “due,” I’m going to scream.
Such as, “We postponed the game do to bad weather.” ARGH!
Nickel, this is for you: http://ask.yahoo.com/20050803.html
August 28th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
My pet peeve is the use of “your” in place of you’re. “our” is not a substitute for “you are”. You’re going to remember that, right?
September 20th, 2005 at 11:20 am
My pet peeves aren’t about grammar. Not that I don’t notice when it is butchered, but I find that I have a remarkable capacity to forgive those errors in the context of good ideas. The two things that get to me are incorrect usage of words that distorts the meaning, and excessive use of passive constructs. Let me explain.
I think anyone reading grammar rants will be familiar with the distinction between “imply” and “infer”. The definitions are quite clearly distinct, but there are people out there who confuse the words. Usually I see “infer” where “imply” is clearly the correct choice. There are other cases, I merely offer that one as an example.
My second peeve is the use of passive constructions. It has its place. It is an ellision of an implicit subject. That can be extremely useful in speaking hypothetically or abstractly where there is no subject. It is even appropriate where the subject is not known. However, it seems to get overused in cases where the subject is known and deliberately not stated.
That’s enough of my ranting. If I continue, I will certainly introduce some choice typos for which I will be chastised myself. However, I wanted to mention two wonderful online resources and ask if anyone else reading this can contribute more. The first is the Chicago Manual of Style FAQ. The second is the 1918 edition of Strunk’s The Elements of Style
September 22nd, 2005 at 3:32 am
My grammatical pet peeve is inappropriate use of ‘and’ when ‘to’ is intended, i.e. the all to common ‘try and succeed/improve/do something’. You’re going to try _and_ succeed?
December 21st, 2005 at 10:04 pm
Mine is impacted as in it impacted our vacation. It could have had an impact on the vacation or affected the vacation, but impacted only refers to teeth, organs, and passages.
See Dictionary
August 6th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
My biggest pet peeve are people who only speak, read, and write ONE language. And while we have current politicians “mandating” that the “official” language become English, it is an inevitability (with current population trends) that we will all end up speaking other languages to conduct business. Chinese, Indian and Spanish come to mind.