What's Your No. 1 Grammar Pet Peeve?

mutmut, The writer should have caught that. The editor should have caught that. The proofreader should have caught that. The spell-check should have caught that. C'est la vie.

I can't remember the last time I read a novel and didn't find at least one typo. The latest was one of the most glaring — the protagonist excused himself to go to the "lavoratory"...

Typos are one thing, grammar errors are another. True, language changes and granted Latin was/is the model for too many conservative grammarians such that many finer points of grammar are obsolete and obscure. Yet, to misuse such common items as lay/lie and I vs. me in formal written English is not excusable on the basis that it's ok "just because everyone says it that way"-- as D'artagnan pointed out in an earlier post. Just who is "everyone"? So I should use the f-word liberally in every formal written sentence just because "everyone says it"?

Alas, those of us who adhere to certain standards of written English are fighting a rearguard action. But we must also realize that language is evolving--what we consider proper usage is debased compared to earlier standards. I consider myself conservative in this regard, as are others in this thread, I suspect, but I think we need to keep in mind that there's probably always been a tension between the standard bearers and the but-everyone-says-it-that-way crowd...

I will join the standard-bearers, for written English at least, with a couple of exceptions. Don't make me unsplit all my infinitives, for one; that's a Latin necessity forced to become an English convention.

In spoken English I'm willing to be much more flexible. Not f-word flexible, necessarily, but I like ain't — I think it's a perfectly good word for casual conversation.

Of course I try not to use it in front of my middle-school daughter... we're still working on "her and I went to the mall..."

p.s. I don't think "lavoratory" is a typo. "Lavetory" maybe, but this is just the whole wrong idea!

Another example that has just struck my mind is computer games in which archaic forms are used.

Age of Empires 2 from Microsoft includes 'you wert' and plenty of other ones I don't remember now.

Icewind Dale 2 is a horror sometimes: 'hath' used for other persons than 3rd singular ('I hath'), 'art' for other than 2nd person singular ('you art' and 'thee' as the subject of a sentence.

It's hard for me to understand how native speakers could make such mistakes... oh well, if they were mistakes and not just random selection of forms. They obviously didn't care. But they couldn't use modern forms instead

It's not just computer games! Almost every time I see those forms used, there's some kind of misuse. Often it's a mixup between thou/thy/thee/thine — seems like folk think they're interchangeable!

And someone was "tasked" with. When did task become a verb? Or am I behind the times?

I don't know if this one has been mentioned yet, but misuse of which and that. Which signals that what follows is not essential to the meaning of the sentence. And a comma must always appear before the word which.

That signals that what follows is essential to the meaning of the sentence.

For example: The car that ran the red light was purple. The focus here is identifying the car that went through the red light, i.e, the purple car. The car, which ran the red light, was purple. The focus here is naming the color of the car. Running the red light is incidental.

I'm getting off my soapbox now.

This is simply not true, AEtH. It is true that it has been a prescription for a good long time but it is not a rule of the English language.

I'd say, given the entry in M-W, that you're way behind the times, AEth.

To unnecessarily split infinitives. That gets me crazy.

And I, myself, dislike reflexive pronouns used as appositives.

Ending sentences with prepositions is something I won't put up with.

Double negatives. I can't not hate that.

When reading a book, dangling modifiers are definitely pet peeves of mine.

How about "We service our clients"? In my mind. a mechanic services a car (the car is inert), a bull services a cow (les and less frequently these days).

I don't want to be serviced! I want to be served!

When you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with....



Possibly this never existed, but it's still to good to ignore:
"XYZ Pharmacy: Where we dispense with accuracy!"