Grammar Policing Of The Day...

People who don't know that "diffuse" and "defuse" are different words really bite.

"affect" and "effect"

"looser" and "loser"

"advise" and "advice"

I often see pundit misspelled as "pundant" as well.

We all have our peeves.

I just wanted to add "defuse"/"diffuse" to the mix.

"Reign in" -- it doesn't even make sense. Have we come so far from the days of the horse that "rein" is a meaningless word now?

The other day I mentioned a film reviewer complaining that a director's talents had "gone down the preverbal crap shoot."

We seem to have gone from preverbal to post-literate without blinking.

Apparently parts of speech are no longer taught in schools, since "diffuse" is an adjective and "defuse" is a verb.

:rofl:

Your acknowledgment is noted, as you will not that the Queen spelled "acknowledgment" properly without having to look it up.

This is, in large part, why She is the Queen, and why Her rein is so, you know, really defuse.

upon her iffusively. Not noting the surprising dearth of final e or final-e or finale.

not-so-loyal subjects. We call them "corpses." And they live under the ground in copses.

Sucking up to the Queen is an important part of being a loyal subject. This must be, or else the whole thing goes down that infamous crap shoot.

But I've got no explanation for "gone down the preverbal crap shoot"--that's just :wtf: :rofl:

shoot" -- the former meaning disappearance into the unknown, and the latter implying unknown outcome. But seeing the two combined that way was a bit of a jolt for this old grammar nazi.

I would imagine he tried to spell-check "proverbial" -- some exceedingly strange things happen linguistically when people are overly dependent on spell-check.

Thank you for sharing my amazement at that construction -- it's nice to have company in The Garden of Ridiculous Stressors, from time to time....heh.

listen.

along with the usual "effect" instead of "affect".

:grr:

hhahaha!

Use/mention error? Or not-a-word error? You be the judge.

...protest otherwise. There are no objective linguistic reasons to claim that "Irregardless" and "ain't" are not "real" words. Methinks grammar Nazis should be forced to take sociolinguistics courses...

Some Shmoe screws up and says something dumb, and dumber people repeat it because they think Shmoe knew what he was doing.

Nobody speaks like Chaucer, anymore.

precious little to do with each other, it seems to me.

I wouldn't study a knife fight in hopes of divining the Marquess of Queensberry rules.

What is called "proper grammar" is just the grammar of the prestige dialect of the language.

Giggle

I'm series!!

People just habitually slip in the apostrophe to that third person pronoun; I don't see it added to "his" or "hers", however.

And once you start seeing it, it's everywhere. I've seen it in commercials, on billboards and proudly displayed on the Home Page of websites. It is amazing how often it's misused.

Sometimes it gets so aggravating that I have to do something. Below is a graphic found on a store's front page. I wrote and told them of the error and then recreated the graphic and sent it to them. All in vain. The error lives!

too

... that refer to "getting undo attention".

I was once sent a headline that said "The rapists say drugs can help." Nearly got published.

They meant to type "Therapists".

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Let's run through it again: you LOSE your car keys. You LOSE an election. You have LOOSE change in your pocket. You LOOSE the dogs of war.

I HATE it *hen someone says that got a "quote" from a contractor or an insurance company.

*hat they got was a QUOTATION.

"Quote" is a VERB.

"Quotation" is a NOUN.

Note: In protest of the continuing occupation of OUR *hite House by the illegal and totally corrupt Bush/Cheney regime of thugs and cronies, I REFUSE to use the letter between "V" and "X".

:shrug:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/loan

:applause:

unless we're talking about big bras :rofl:

NO, YOU DUMBFUCK! You have a 'sinking' suspicion.

Suspicions don't sneak, they sink! Ghaah!!!

Wouldn't a "sinking suspicion" eventually defeat the suspicion anyway?

I've a sneaking suspicion my usage will not change in that regard... :thumbsup:

There's nothing wrong with "sneaking suspicion." I've never heard of a "sinking" suspicion. But it's pointless to argue since you've already pulled a Scanners and obviously aren't around to see what I'm saying. :P

It's "toe the line". Argh. If someone is going to accuse someone of being a kissass at least get the cliche' right.

:scared:

:toast:

one about lining up for a race, another about boats... :shrug:

just to drive you crazy, i once saw someone type about "toting the line." ;-)

I get this image of someone's head as a giant coffee mug and everytime they lean over the paper to read it some of their brains splash over the rim onto the paper they're reading.

You "pore" over a report --- look so closely at the details that you can see its "pores".

I mean "it's pores", of course.

Of Coarse.

Did you read that book?
Yes, I read it.
We need a different spelling for one of those.

that people truly don't know there's a difference.

Compliment - to say something nice about a person's characteristics or appearance.

Complement - to set off another object by the first object's shape, color, size. etc.

as in "complementary colors". Examples: Red-Green, Yellow-Purple, Blue-Orange.

These mistakes will soon become an accepted part of written language, because there is no way that a spell-checker that can't check context will catch them.

against the forces of idiocy. Sigh.

Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks don't have spelling bees for a reason. German is not much different from English when it comes to pronunciation, and it's spelling is pretty phonetic, so I can't see why English's couldn't be.

should have went
should of been
I seen three of them

"If I would of knowed I could of rode, I would of went.
But if I would of went, I couldn't of et nothing nohow."

He was a language snob. He once heard a man say "Hey, him and me, we seen what you done" and over the years, as a mental exercise, he would try to get one more error into that construction. I doubt that he succeeded.
-----------------------------
Edit to add second line of Grandpa's quotation, which took awhile to pop up on the cerebral hard drive!

on the "whom" vs "who" vs "whose" thing. :) Thanks in advance.

grammar girl explains it thusly: When you're trying to decide whether to use who or whom, ask yourself if the answer to the question would be he or him. That's the trick: if you can answer the question being asked with him, then use whom, and it's easy to remember because they both end with m. For example, if you're trying to ask, "Who (or whom) do you love?" The answer would be "I love him." Him ends with an m, so you know to use whom. But if you are trying to ask, "Who (or whom) stepped on Squiggly?" the answer would be "He stepped on Squiggly." There's no m, so you know to use who. So that's the quick and dirty trick: if you can't remember that you use whom when you are referring to the object of the sentence, just remember that him equals whom. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/who-versus-whom.aspx

So the tv butler sounding fancy by asking "Whom shall I say is calling?" is wrong, because the answer to the question is "HE is calling" not "him is calling"

Not sure what the mystery is on whose (unless it's who's versus whose). Whose bike is that? It belongs to my brother, who's a messenger.

Jesus.

That really grinds my ass! I was expecting to encounter errant verb tenses, maybe the odd dangling participle. But really, a vocabulary issue, your example is one of. The prior sentence would appear to be a grammar issue.

:shrug:

-Hoot

but decided it would take at least 40 replies to find anyone would might appreciate it. So I decided it wasn't worth the hassle of coming up with a better class-term that would serve as an umbrella for both types of mis-uses. There are other reasons, but that one suffices.

I feel the proper use of *ords is called proper diction.

Note: In protest of the continuing occuapation of OUR *hite House by the illegal and totally corrupt Bush/Cheney regime of thugs and cronies, I REFUSE to use the letter bet*een "V" and "X".

:P

What would we EVER DO...without you "one-liner" idiot posters. :shrug: I guess we couldn't survive, here. :eyes:

:P

:hug:

Instead of "asked". :banghead:

In Old English texts one can find both "Ascian" and "Acsian". In Middle English these had become "ask and "aks" in different English dialects.

He ran quick :banghead:

It should be: He ran quickly.

2) The lack of past perfect tenses: I saw a guy on TV who said a tornado "spinned" instead of "Spun".

:banghead:

...Old English. Compare English and German, German has retained a lot more strong verbs that have become weak in English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb

That drives me crazy. So many use lead as the past tense.

:dunce:

:hide:

I guess you are spreading or scattering the wires. :P

that drives me up the wall!

I don't know hwy that one annoys me so, but it does.

In speech the "a" is fused onto "lot" and is reduced from the vowel (as in "fate") to a reduced <ə> vowel, and, so in pronounced (in my neck of the moods), using IPA pronunciation symbols, as <əlat>. Hence the misspelling, "alot" more closely fits the pronunciation.

is not a word. The correct word is "converse."

It always makes me smile (while I cringe simultaneously).

One of my favorite student mistakes is, "It's a doggy dog world out there!"

1. insure vs. ensure vs. assure
2. titled vs. entitled

HA! I used BOTH words correctly in one sentence!

Beat THAT!

:rofl:

Especially when they come to work right after lunch.

Most of what they spew is nonsense, as anyone who knows anything about Sociolinguistics, there is not such thing as inherently "good" or "bad" in languages, only different dialects. There is nothing wrong with split infinitives, that BS came around because some idiot Grammarians thought that because Latin didn't have them English shouldn't have them. Ain't was a perfectly fine word until 200 years ago until it was marked out as bad because of classist BS

translates as "walla" on many internet sites? appalling, i know, but there you have it.

How do they translate voilà?

Nt.