So, do you want to get a knife when you hear someone say "you can talk to John or myself"?
That is possibly the thing that annoys me more than anything else: reflexive pronouns used non-reflexively. People who work in banks do this all the time: "We will notify yourself..." etc. They think it is somehow more formal and polite to say "yourself" instead of "you". This is like people who think that "whom" means exactly the same thing as "who" but is more formal.
Every once in a while it irritates me when people confuse 'can' and 'may' but it happens so often that I'd end up being a muttering old coot if I took it too seriously.
What annoys me more than that is people mixing up "may" and "might". "Might" being used for "may" is bad enough, but you
very often (nowadays) see "may" used instead of "might" - such as in
this thread - and it is so jarring. I just don't understand how anyone can do that. It sounds so wrong.
For the record: "may" is present or future; "might" is past or conditional. That's all the difference between them. It is not hard to learn.
"Ain't" is used a lot and I admit, I'm one of the ones who use it, but I find it hilarious as I see many non-Americans here at CFC are beginning to use it. The first time I saw that I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. I'm thinking, we're corrupting them!
There's nothing American about "ain't". It first appeared in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and is very common in Britain, especially in some dialects/accents such as Cockney.
"Folks, what we're watching is an historical event." No it's not, it's
a historic event.
You'd think newscasters/reporters would use better grammar than the average person.
I must disagree with you there: "an" before "h" is perfectly correct - though rather precious - and anything that occurs is a historical event, so the claim in question is perfectly true although not very informative. Although you're right, of course, that that's not what they intend to say.
And there's nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction.
That's right! There's nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition either, although it is inelegant. And "different to" is an acceptable alternative to "different from" as well, so if anyone insists it's wrong, they're wrong. However, the American "different than" is definitely wrong, no matter how often people use it.
I assume it's her Halloween costume.
You mean, of course, "Hallowe'en"...
Eran of Arcadia said:
This is where my prescriptivist and descriptivist tendencies really are at war with each other. On the one hand, language is what its users declare it to be, and if enough people decide that a given word or phrase means a given thing, then it does. On the other hand, the phrase in question comes from a specific field where it has a specific (and useful) meaning, and no synonyms for its original meaning. What am I to do?
The problems go deeper than that, though. Take "disinterested". Everyone who knows anything about the English language knows that this does not mean "uninterested"; it means (roughly) "unbiased". And people who use it to mean "uninterested" - increasingly common - are wrong. However, it
did originally mean "uninterested". It then changed meaning to "unbiased". It's now changing back again. So when we criticise people for misusing the word, we're effectively saying the first change was legitimate and the second is not. Which seems highly arbitrary.
warpus said:
I hate this too, but it is proper to use an apostrophe when you make something plural, in some cases.
If Wikipedia says that, then, as usual, Wikipedia is wrong. It is never right to use an apostrophe to make an acronym into a plural; there should be no confusion, because the acronym will be in upper case while the "s" is in lower case (eg, "SUVs"). The same goes for dates. So, for example, "the 1600's" is horribly wrong.
In passing, a particular pet hate of mine is people using (say) "the 1600s" when they mean "the seventeenth century". "The 1600s" is the name of the first decade of the seventeenth century. Referring to an entire century by the name of its first decade is yet another Americanism that seems to be getting very common everywhere; I can't count the number of times I have heard or seen "the mid-1800s" to mean around 1850, instead of around 1805.
Also, it's AD 100, not 100 AD.
Jawz II said:
Theres no right or wrong, as long as people understand what you mean.
That's not true, because language isn't just about
mere communication - it's about
ease of communication. For eaxplme, I can witre a snetnece lkie tihs, and you siltl udenrstnad me, but it's not as easy as usual. If I write like that, then the way in which I am writing gets in the way of interpretation. You can still understand me, but you have to make more of an effort. Similarly, if someone makes masses of grammatical or spelling errors, then yes, I can still understand them - but the communication doesn't flow as easily as it would if they wrote properly.
Basically, if you write badly, you are putting an unnecessary imposition upon your audience. You are effectively saying, "I can't be arsed to take the time to make this easy to understand; instead, you're going to have to make the effort instead." Which is pretty arrogant, really, because you're implying that what you have to say is so amazing that people will be willing to do that.
Other pet hates: saying "refute" to mean "deny" - very common now on the news ("I absolutely refute what the leader of the opposition is saying" - no, you're not). Also, people talking about "bad grammar" when they actually mean bad spelling. Spelling and grammar are not the same thing.
There's an odd thing with commas which is becoming common. I think it somehow comes from German, but I may be wrong. It's putting a comma after an opening noun phrase or even noun. Thus: "The chancellor of the exchequer, made an important announcement today." Again, I simply cannot understand why anyone would do that, since it ruins the flow of the sentence.
And, finally, the expression "grammar nazi", which is peculiarly insulting. If anyone really thinks that criticising people for misusing apostrophes is somehow equivalent to murdering millions of people then I think they're the ones with the problem.
