Where?

I always post this way: the excerpt first; then the link separately.

Go ahead , shoot me!

I don't see why that should impact you.

could culminate in being labeled a looser

It creates an interesting effect, though, in the first few responses.

is an error where they don't know how it is spelled. They aren't confusing the tenses. They just don't know who to spell/pronounce it. So they thing "loose" is pronounced the way "lose" is pronounced and think that is the word they are using.

It rhymed with "goose" but then "lose" doesn't rhyme with "rose." English can be confusing. Still if it is your first language, one would think the difference had been taught at some point.

>>>English can be confusing.>>>>

One is twice-blessed to have learned it in the crib.

It must drive ESL speakers nuts.

And I try to be picky about grammar, but I suck at it because even though it's my first language, I actually had most of my schooling done in French. Yes, we had to take English classes like everyone else, but for some reason teachers didn't feel like they needed to teach a bunch of grammar to us (they concentrated on reading comprehension, maybe because it seemed like all we did in French was grammar). All of my classes, other than English, were taught in French. I feel like I am seriously lacking, and often make mistakes in grammar. That said, I know the difference between loose and lose, there-their-they're, and so on. But ask me about 'who' or 'whom', or if I should put 'I' or 'me' or where exactly is the best place for each comma, I have issues. I had no idea impact as a verb was wrong. I do know the difference between affect and effect, but didn't even know impact was related, LOL.

Always bugs me (a little)

(That sentence, BTW, is correct.)

as in "effect a change." And the noun "affect" (pronounced differently than the verb) is all the rage in current academic lingo.

So, while (noun then) people verb nouns, "verb" comes pre-nouned.

...1/10th smaller than the one you have been wearing.

A big trend.

This must be actioned.

You can be ticketed for speeding.

Etc.

I expect in most cases I use it correctly. If I have to stop and think about which one I should be using - I'll get it wrong.

When folks use 'there' (or even their) when they mean 'they are' (they're) I just want to bite their head off.

The very worst though is 'should of' when they mean 'should have' (should've). Then there's 'to' instead of 'too'. Some people don't seem to know that there is a too (you know with two 'o' s).

But, I'm just whining. I'm sure I annoy plenty of people with my improper use of semicolons and little dashes. I never know when the period goes inside or outside of quotes or parenthesis etc. I'm always typing on the fly and I'm an engineer not an English teacher - and I don't exactly do a lot of research on what's proper before I post, but some of these things - people should have picked up by junior high.

I see more of it on Facebook than I do on DU.

"The moose is on the loose," and "you lose you loser."

...though I always fall asleep when I read the rules of grammar and punctuation.

I'm paying dearly for not taking my English classes more seriously.

confusing use of abbreviations and orphan paragraphs.

What's an easy one? Are you referring to the previous or the following paragraph or neither? What is "w." or is the period the end of the sentence and if the period ends a sentence what is a "w" and why didn't you capitalize the m in my?

That's an easy one. Its abuse drives me crazier than I make other people w. my craven "impact."

the unholy proliferation of apostrophes being used in plural words sends me into fits of murderous rage.

...alone. Maybe not murderous, but it really grate's on my nerve's. (JK - couldn't resist)

As a former copy editor, the grammatical errors I see on DU make me want to tear my hair out.

This is a message board. People dash off posts. They make mistakes. I'm better at grammar and spelling than most people I know, and I make mistakes in casual writing of this sort.

What makes me want to tear my hair out is when I see the errors in newspapers and other such sources. Published material ought to be proofread and ought to be proofread by people who know what they're doing.

our ability to communicate with one another. This applies not only to grammar, but also to vocabulary, the grasp of which has become weaker and weaker in the general population.

As an example, a former roommate would often ask me to do things and, when I followed her request to the letter, she would go into a rage because she actually meant something else. She thought she was being quite clear; she was just using a word that didn't mean what she thought it meant.

I am glad the article in that link also mentioned "borrow" and "loan." There is actually a pawn shop's commercial on the local radio here that encourages the listener, "LOAN as much as you want!" Really? A pawn shop wants ME to loan THEM money?

Two more words that are constantly misused, at least on paper: choose and chose.

As for the misplacement of "me" and "I" as well as "he" and "him," that grates on my nerves no end. I have learned that almost no one appreciates being corrected, so I don't say anything, but what I would like to do is encourage the speaker to try taking one of the words out of the sentence. Would "Me and him went to the store" work as "Me went to the store" or "Him went to the store"? How about "Him went to the store with I"? I think this would make it clear, but as I said, it's really hard to get that message across when so many people are outraged that one would be rude enough to point out how they could communicate more clearly.

...messes up the I/me and he/him/she/her usage when speaking in the singular.

Years ago, I had a much beloved neighbor who always said "I should have came...," or "I should have went...". I had to be constantly vigilant not to instinctively correct her because I know it would have insulted her terribly, but it was difficult to resist.

When people ask me, "Can I borrow a Kleenex?", if it is someone I know to have a good sense of humor, I will kid around and say, "No, but you can have one. I won't want it back."

And, as long as we're talking about impact, how about the thoroughly cringeworthy "impactful"? Yuck, yuck, yuck.

People who use you and I, or Joe and I, where it should be you and me. Such as, when you finish up the report send a copy to Joe and I. It should be Joe and me, as in, when you finish the report send a copy to me, not send a copy to I. I am an educator and 90+% of my coworkers make this mistake. I am a math and science guy and the English folks do it. 😡😡😡

Ok, me done now.

Which it does, in a way. So they are guessing it should be "I." The trick is to break it into two sentences so you can see that. Send the report to Joe. Send the report to me. There you can see Send the report to I - would be wrong.

That one's so simple I have trouble understanding why people don't get it.

That was in the '30s. It's not my dialect but he nailed in an observationally adequate and sufficient way. "John and me went to the party" is okay in that dialect; "I said that that would be between me and John, so butt out" is also okay. IIRC--and I may not, it's been a decade sence I've looked at HL's work--the rule was "objective case" next to a verb or preposition, nominative otherwise.

That's different from hypercorrection on top of that. "John and me went to the party" people are told is wrong, and in standard English it's "John and I went to the party." Then when they get to "Between me and John" people know is also non-standard and they fix it, so it comes out "Between John and I". Worse yet, that's reinforced because suddenly the pronoun isn't preposition-adjacent and "John" is apparently caseless.

Best to teach that kind of thing not as "incorrect" but as "dialectal."

I know a high school English teacher who thinks "I've went" is standard English. Once had a student who did an upper-level linguistics paper on past participle/preterite forms in her peers' English. It was at a small school that pulled in students, 18-22 years old, from mostly the NE and mid-west US. The data were all over the place, she had forms attested that I hadn't thought in use. What she found most interesting was that the same student would use different forms for the past participle depending on context--contraction + participle would sometimes be different than full auxiliary + participle. If she'd gone to grad school, that would have been the basis of a good publishable paper. (I known people who are consistent with "I've went" but also consistently say "I *have* gone" and "I haven't gone". Nailing down the distribution would be cool.)

"Joe and I are going to the bar after work." "When you finish that report, could you cc Joe and me?"

Last edited Mon Jun 30, 2014, 01:49 PM - Edit history (1)

This one really got to me:

Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer who represented Edith Windsor in her legal fight against DOMA, looks back at the beginning of the end

By Justin Snow on June 25, 2014
@JustinCSnow

“It literally took me seconds to decide it was the perfect case,” Roberta Kaplan recounts of her first meeting with Edith Windsor.
....

METRO WEEKLY: Who is Robbie Kaplan?

ROBERTA KAPLAN: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the late ’70s and ’80s. My uncle was in the Peace Corps in India when I was a young kid and I spent a lot of time hanging out with my mother’s mother, my grandmother. We were very close. And she wrote him a letter when he was in India saying that one day she said to me, “Robbie, why is it you just can’t stop talking. You talk all the time!” And she reports in the letter that I said something like, “Grandmother, I just can’t help myself. I just love to talk.” So I think that’s probably the age when my destiny was set in terms of my future career path.

When I was a little bit older, around ten or so, my mom had a subscription to New York magazine and The New Yorker and I remember reading those and thinking to myself, this is where I want to live. I want to move to New York. So around the age of 10, I put a plan in place to move to New York, which eerily enough I then followed through with.

And part of the plan to move to New York was to go to an Ivy League college and then go to law school in New York. And that’s pretty much exactly what I did. I went to Harvard undergrad and then I went to Columbia Law School.

MW: How did you and Edie Windsor meet?

KAPLAN: What had happened after Thea died, Edie realized she was going to have an estate tax problem, I think, but she didn’t realize the enormity of it. And once she did, she was indignant. She wanted to find someone to take her case.

There was this documentary made about her and Thea, A Very Long Engagement, and she felt based on that documentary she had a documented marriage. Today no one would think that they would need to document their marriage that way, but things were different even that recently. And because of this documentary, this documented marriage, she thought she could really bring this case and that it was a good case for her to bring.

So she went around looking for lawyers. Fortunately for me she was turned down by some of the gay civil rights groups. And as a result, she has a good friend who actually helped she and Thea to go to Toronto to get married and he is friends with a friend of mine. He said Edie was looking for a lawyer, and my friend said he knew just the person and my friend called me and asked if I would give her a call, and that’s what I did.

Harvard undergrad and Columbia Law School. If I had made that mistake in the eighth grade, my test would have come back covered with red ink.

By the way, she actually used "enormity" correctly, but I'm not certain she meant to. She used "literally" correctly too.

Except maybe to get HER a grammar textbook.

To "ensure" means to make certain that a particular situation happens or exists.


Insurance is taken out against the possibility of something happening; ensuring makes it happen.

Examples of homonym and pronoun use, just for added clarity:

"If you and I were to lose our loose grammar religion, we, along with the rest of 'them,' would just expose the illogic and then frequently practice pronouns' logical uses."

"It is she and I who know her and me."

"If you're a person who wears your loose clothes like raggedy cloths, you look like a loser."

"The Obama regime demands the regimen of citizenship for the 99% while accepting exceptionalism for the 1%."

Thank you.

I hear those words interchanged a lot and it drives me crazy.

So does "hisself" instead of himself, using "over" when you mean "more than" and using possessive apostrophes on plural acronyms or initialisms.

I also cringe at the word "fixin'" (as in, "We're fixin' to go to the store&quot and the phrase "might could" when you mean might or maybe.

A few years ago, the company where I worked was searching for an editor to join the publication team. After 40 applicants failed the editor's exam, the department manager jokingly announced that he had changed the job description and was now searching for anyone who could read and write the English language.

I see this in otherwise esteemed publications whose editors should know better if not outlaw it outright.
The masses are starting to pick it up, all too often with not a single item in the list having a comma.

It's employed when the items aren't single words or simple adjective-noun phrases and so require the use of commas within more than one item. It can't be outlawed without producing near-gibberish. It's stylistically constrained, though. The problem is that many people think of punctuation as a set of rules and not a set of tools.

It's also fine when the list is separated by line breaks. I can't put commas there and to use no punctuation grates on my sensibilities.

"I saw my mother, who had lived in New York, my aunt, who had lived there at the same time and who, after falling out with my mother, decided to move to Rochester, my cousin Gertie from Virginia, my cousin Gertie from North Carolina, and my half-sister who'd lived with us until I was 6 but who, after my mother's divorce from my father, had asked to live with Velma from Lubbock."

"I saw my mother, who had lived in New York; my aunt, who had lived there at the same time and who, after falling out with my mother, decided to move to Rochester; my cousin Gertie from Virginia; my cousin Gertie from North Carolina; and my half-sister who'd lived with us until I was 6 but who, after my mother's divorce from my father, had asked to live with Velma from Lubbock."

The style manual I used to follow strongly wanted a comma after the final "and", and so "... North Carolina; and, my half-sister who'd lived with us ...". An intervening supervisor frowned upon the Oxford comma and so I've dropped it with run-in semi-colons. (If I'm using semi-colons in a list, that Oxford comma still shows up and the final semi-colon and "and" are appended to the second-to-last item in the list.)

Thanks for your comments. Certainly if some of the items in the list "require" commas, then perhaps semicolons are a solution, but there are certainly other solutions that don't introduce new problems and can make it more readable. Here's a start:

"I saw my mother, my aunt, my two cousins and my half sister. My mother and aunt had lived together in New York but had had a falling out, so my aunt and her daughter Gertie had moved to Rochester. The other cousin also goes by Gertie and boy did that sometimes make for some confusing conversation! ..."

...you get the idea...

As far as a comma before the last and, I always strive to leave it off because I do believe that is what I see when reading my New Yorker, Atlantic and NY Times. I think that's also what Strunk and White say (it's on my other desk, so I can't check).

Completely, fully, and proudly.

"Impact" as a verb.

I hear/see it everywhere.

People have difficulty with how to use quotes within quotes (or parentheses within parentheses).


I typed, "People have difficulty with how to use quotes."

Just then, I quoted myself when I wrote, "I typed, 'People have difficulty with how to use quotes'."

In writing, "Just then, I quoted myself when I wrote, 'I typed, "People have difficulty with how to use quotes"'," keeping track of the quotation marks was a pain.

It can be messy with quotation marks (as you should know).

Parentheses can be messy, too (remember I said it was messy "with quotation marks [as you should know]"?).

It really pays to avoid embedding embedded quotes and parentheses.

Who mostly quote themselves quoting various authorities with whom they are embedded. Entanglements are a problem there too.

It's certainly true that apostrophes are overused, but it isn't true that they should never be used to indicate a plural. Some of this depends on individual style guides, of course (as far as I know, the NY Times is now in a very small minority of styles that call for the apostrophe on decades, for instance, though that used to be much more common). Other cases, though, generally do call for plurals in forming the apostrophe, including lower-case letters (without an apostrophe, multiple a's would look the same as as, after all) and abbreviations that use multiple periods and/or both lower-case and capital letters. There are some other irregular plurals (do's, maybe's) in which the apostrophe may be controversial, but has its defenders.




The first part of the bolded sentence is possibly/arguably true, but the second part is false. I'm pretty sure that impact was used as a verb long before it was used as a noun, though it didn't mean affect at the time. Of course, the noun impact didn't used to mean effect, either, and that usage remains controversial in formal settings. So grammar geeks might cringe at that too. Impact appeared as a verb to mean collide, and then appeared as a noun to mean collision, and then was used figuratively, extending from the collision, to mean effect. That was a couple of centuries ago. The figurative extension to the verb use is more recent, but it's been around for quite a while. Personally, I think it can provide a useful nuance in certain contexts. If my use of it makes grammar geeks cringe, I can take it

according to the Online Etymology Dictionary here: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=impact&searchmode=none

It dates its figurative usage as a synonym for 'affect' to 1935. The grammar geeks may not like it, but it is now in standard use.

She probably didn't look the word up in the dictionary lol.

Yep, I agree. I can understand the importance of maintaining the distinction in technical/scientific contexts, but as far as general use goes, that bird has flown

Last edited Mon Jun 30, 2014, 07:41 AM - Edit history (1)

Quick Answer..

More Explanation..
Read more at http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/affect_effect.htm#VaW6xEUraeRqyC05.99

thanks for making me look it up, Smarmie. now I have a better grasp. I love the English language.

Edit: Spelling..

Because you love the English language so much.

"Discrete" and "discreet" ("discrete" means "separate"; "discreet" means "tactful&quot .

"Lay" and "lie" (I'm looking at you, Bob Dylan): "lay" takes an object, "lie" subject. I may lie down but not lay down.

"Who" and "whom"; "who" is subject, "whom" is object. "To whom am I speaking?" "Who shall I say called?"

"Moot": if something is a moot point, it's open to debate, not superfluous (like "moot court" in law school).

"May" and "might"; if you may have gotten malaria on your vacation to India, you don't know yet and are waiting on bloodwork. If you might have, you were lucky and didn't.

"Less" and "fewer"; if something is countable, it's "fewer" (20 items or fewer, not "less&quot .

really gripe my ass!

Someone who wrote an article on HuffPo used the word "charish" in the headline. I clicked on the article just to see what in the world it was about. It seems she meant "cherish." The first comment on the article was mine: "Cherish is the word."

She replied rather nastily, "Oh, I see the typo police are out! It must be so nice for you to never make a mistake."

I replied that her mistake was a misspelling, NOT a typo, and if anything I expected an "Oops! Thanks!" from her rather than mean-tempered sarcasm. After all, she claimed to be an EDITOR, the word was in the headline, and I should think she'd be more interested in getting it right than in attacking a proofreader, which she obviously needs but is too arrogant to admit it or too cheap to hire one.

This second comment was not published, and then the whole article disappeared.

Not a typo. It is a misspelling plain and simple. People who don't read often get these things wrong.

http://www.grammartips.homestead.com/affect.html

(It also happens to be one of my articles on my Grammar and Usage for the Non-Expert website.)

Meaning that I actually do care about this.

Posted while relaxing on my "chaise lounge" (another pet hate of mine.....)

literally within reach (I'm just having fun with you), the Fourth Edition of the Prentice-Hall Handbook for Writers. The copyright dates are 1951, 1954, 1960, and 1965. There are many equivalent books. I find them at yard sales and library book sales for maybe 25 cents or a dollar. I think their use must be outlawed at many newspapers today.

ETA:

Here's the newest one, I think: Prentice Hall Handbook for Writers (12th Edition)

One review says that it's not as good as earlier editions.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich offers this: Handbook for Writers

What's interesting is that the last editions came out just as the Internet got big. Hmmmmm.

Or worse, "impactfully." Two garbage words that mean nothing beyond the writer doesn't know what they're talking about, and furthermore, doesn't care.