Common Errors in English

I hate it when people spell 'lose' with two o's! It's lose! Lose!!! Lose weight, lose your shoe, total loser, lost puppy, losing battle.

Loose is a completely different word, people! Loose cannon, loose string, loose morals...

Also, it's 'definitely' not 'definatly' or 'definately'

It's amazing how many people are persistent in spelling it "definatley", even when they've seen it spelled right.

I know! None of my friends ever spell it right, no matter how many times I type it correctly. One girl seems to be convinced that it's the correct spelling despite all evidence to the contrary, she's like the flat earther of spelling.

I think people get confused because "definite" and "separate" tend to get pronounced similarly.

"Irregardless" drives me nuts.

The worst part is that I'm so attuned to hating "irregardless" that I can get a false positive from "irrespective" that it takes me a second to think through.

Also, it's "surprise" not "suprise" or "suprize". Argh.

I guesstimate harry will freak out in 3...2...1...

*please don't kill me, I actually hate that too.

Speaking of, "seperate" is another common internet misspelling.

People actually think it's "suprise"? What the fuck?

Oh man, I am so sending this to my room-mate. He apparently went to some hippie/commie school where they didn't teach grammar and any way the kids wanted to spell words was the correct way. My English degree burns up when I just think about it.

Also, confusing or not knowing the difference between then and than has got to be the most common message board error, and it actually bothers me, unlike most errors, because it continually trips me up as to intended meaning when I'm reading a sentence.

Affect/effect creates a common confusion as well. Devin even used effect when he should have used affect in an article the other day, and I'm sure he knows the difference and just slipped up, but that just goes to show that it's an easy error to make, because his grammar is good.

The mistake I make most often when I'm not paying attention is using the contraction "it's" when I intend the possessive form of the pronoun (its). I hate it when I do that, especially if someone quotes me, so I can't fix it.

Don't make Beanbag angry, you wouldn't like it when he's angry.

My wife goes batshit crazy any time someone says "I feel badly for you."

It's vs Its.


People never get this one right. I sometimes get it wrong.

And sometimes people just get "the itis".

I'm one of those. But I'm getting better, I think.

The misuse of penultimate drives me nuts, especially when you hear "professional" people like sportscasters use it incorrectly: "The Super Bowl is the penultimate game of the NFL season!"

I remember this exchange I had with someone on a messageboard:

HIM: I just made the penultimate garden!

ME: You mean it's your second-last garden?

HIM: Huh?

Keep in mind he was from Britain, the birthplace of the language.

Using it's as a possessive annoys me too, but not quite as much.

The one that drives me crazy are the folks who use "impact" as a verb. You want "affect", folks. Look it up.

"Negative. It didn't go in. Just affected on the surface."

Well, it is if you count the Pro Bowl.

It's and Its aggravates the hell out of me. I've seen plenty of respectable print outlets get them mixed up, and it baffles me as to how. Same with decades like the 60s and 70s. Those apostrophes don't belong there!!!

And the next person that types "should of" instead of "should have" is getting busted in the chops.

One error that always bugs me is when folks use the word "that" when referring to people, as in, "People that use bad grammar piss me off." You use "who" with people and "that" with objects.

Correct
"People who use bad grammar piss me off."
"I don't like balls that are blue."

Don't loose your cool, Werewolf Girl.

I think it depends on how hard you pronounce the "h" at the beginning.

There was an article in GQ a year or so back that said that texting language (txt lng?) is slowly becoming a sign of power. Those who are busy and important have no time for the extra sliver of microsecond it takes to press the shift or capital key, nor do they need punctuation. And if your silly peon couldn't understand lwj2 (lunch w john at 2), well, then you just get to fire his ass. This is mostly based on Crackberries, mind you, where big thumbs and tiny buttons make for a bad conversation, but it did give one pause for thought.

Ugh. That was a terrible joke and I apologize. I have Star Wars on the brain. If I was you I'd be rolling my eyes.

Quick! Spot the grammatical error in the last sentence of the paragraph above.

Mistakes like this really bother me to.

All kidding aside, there are about a dozen basic mistakes in usage that I see every day, and that really drive me up the wall. I wind up reading other peoples' writing all the time (the burden that a teacher has to bear) and some of the basic errors are repeated over and over again. Their instead of there. To instead of too. The thing is, I don't think that people are that ignorant (are they?). I think that they just don't care one way or another. I find that even more depressing than the mistakes themselves. Freedom in communication is important, and I think that it's great that people want to express things in new or different ways. But imprecision because of sheer laziness just turns my screws.

While we're on the subject of strange language usage, what's the deal with ending sentences with "yeah?" I get the Brit habit of sticking an interrogative yeah at the end of everything, just to make sure that you're still listening (there must be lots of distractions in the UK). But the habit of pausing in mid-phrase, then just figuring "the hell with it," dropping in a "yeah" and stopping?

Example:

"So then we came back from Jimmy's and...yeah."

Can we all agree to stop doing that?

Their their. Itll all be better soon.

"Negative. It didn't go in. It just hit the surface."

Better...

Or even more appropriate: "Negative. It didn't go in. I just detonated on the surface."

Alas, let's not get started on correcting grammar from the Star Wars films. We'd spend a fucking year just on Yoda.

Agreed. We are just scratching the surface of a giant pile of bad grammar.

Well, I meant this sentence: "If I was you I'd be rolling my eyes."

It should read, "If I were you..."

I guess it's another pet peeve of mine. Whenever I'm singing along with The Doors' "Light my Fire," I always sing "If I were to say to you, girl we couldn't get much higher." The line in the song goes, "If I was to say to you..." which is technically incorrect, and has always bugged me. Why didn't the Ed Sullivan show attempt to correct Morrison's grammar when they had the opportunity, dang it?

I thought you could use "that" with both people and objects?

I'll kill you! I'll kill all of you! Especially the members of the jury...

The section on there, their, and they're should be the first thing anyone sees before they're allowed to use a browser.

So many lives endangered by the mere threat of my inevitably unleashed murderous grammatical rage could be spared by implementing this simple correction.

"Hello, children! WHOM do you love?!"

Eh, even that link admits "whom" is pretty much on the way out, so that doesn't bother me all that much.

That shit really annoys me, and I'm Swedish, so just imagine how I feel trying to read some of the stuff in my own language.

I almost never mind the tiny, common mistakes. People just pick up bad habits, and I tell myself it's their parents' fault. BUT there is one thing that ruins me, and that's when people overcorrect, or use language that they think is high and respectable but is in fact horrendous. The combination of trying to be right while missing the fundamentals just shows that they are in it for the appearances and not for the cosmic order.

The use of "he/she and I" as an object, or of "whom" as a subject, or of "myself" as a non-reflexive pronoun: these things dismantle me.

I hate it when people pronounce the word "specific" as "pacific".

As does marquee/marquis. Really? A French noblemen was holding the name of the movie you saw last night? Fantastic!

I could care less.

Y'know what's been really pissing me off lately? When I'm reading a newspaper or magazine article and there are words missing or misspelled (for example "The steelworker was injured when hit his head" - WTF hit his head?). It's like proofreading has become a lost art.

Considering the awful copy editing process the big newspaper here in town has, I would say you're correct about that. It really does seem like they don't give a shit.

In fact it's almost as if they could care less.

I've also been surprised to learn that the word "voluptuous" is actually pronounced "volumptuous".

I hate "My bad".

My what? BAD is an adjective, not a noun!

Oh my.

The AP has a hard and fast rule about it, but, of course, that only applies to newspapers.

The word "that" is also an issue because it is used unnecessarily extremely often. It isn't something that really irritates anyone, but the word isn't needed in a sentence like, "He told me that they're going to the bar." I don't think that's technically wrong (except, like the previous rule, for AP writers), but it certainly doesn't need to be there.