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.

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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"?

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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...

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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

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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 Rolling Eyes

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@Roberta,

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

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@dupre,

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.

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@Always Eleven to him,

Quote:

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.

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.

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@Always Eleven to him,

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

Quote:

M-W:
Main Entry:
task
Function:
transitive verb
Date:
14th century

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To unnecessarily split infinitives. That gets me crazy.

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@Mr Stillwater,

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

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@roger,

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

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Double negatives. I can't not hate that.

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@Mr Stillwater,

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

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@Roberta,

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!

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@Wy,

Quote:

I don't want to be serviced! I

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!"

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@Paola,

Mother gave the cookies to Janie.
Mother also gave the cookies to I??? ( I don't think so).

Just because a lot of people say it, doesn't make it right. "I" is a subjective pronoun, meaning that it should only be used as part of a subject, never as part of the object.
Conversely, there is nothing inherently wrong with using the word "Me", as so many people seem to think. "Me" is an objective pronoun, meaning that it should only be used as part of the object of a sentence, never as part of the subject. But, as the object of the sentence, it the only first person pronoun that is correct to use. In fact, to replace the word "Me" with the word "I" as the object of a sentence is simply wrong, no matter how many people do it. I suppose that, like most bastardizations of the language, it will eventually come to be accepted with continued misuse, but currently it is still deprecated by nearly all authorities on the English language.

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@rydinearth,

Quote:

Mother also gave the cookies to I??? ( I don't think so).

Quote:

Just because a lot of people say it, doesn't make it right. "I" is a subjective pronoun, meaning that it should only be used as part of a subject, never as part of the object.

I don't think that many people say that, rydinearth. In fact, I don't think anyone would say that. I only got two hits for "gave the cookies to I" and both were people discussing the sorry state that language was in. Needless to say, I will forgo their arguments; been there, done that, nothing to see, hear or read.

Quote:

Conversely, there is nothing inherently wrong with using the word "Me", as so many people seem to think. "Me" is an objective pronoun, meaning that it should only be used as part of the object of a sentence, never as part of the subject. But, as the object of the sentence, it the only first person pronoun that is correct to use. In fact, to replace the word "Me" with the word "I" as the object of a sentence is simply wrong, no matter how many people do it. I suppose that, like most bastardizations of the language, it will eventually come to be accepted with continued misuse, but currently it is still deprecated by nearly all authorities on the English language.

Let's begin at the end. Actually, all knowledgeable authorities on the English language know that coordinated subjects/objects do not act the same in language as single subjects/objects.

The people who you're thinking of aren't language experts. They're simply a group of people who have repeated old wives tales/prescriptions without ever applying any thought to their veracity.

Quote:

Grammar Puss

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. This article is taken in part from his book [The Language Instinct] (Morrow, February 1994).

Turning to the Democrats, Safire gets on Bill Clinton's case, as he puts it, for asking voters to "give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back." No one would say [give I a break], because the indirect object of [give] must have objective case. So it should be [give Al Gore and me a chance.]

Probably no "grammatical error" has received as much scorn as "misuse" of pronoun case inside conjunctions (phrases with two parts joined by [and] or [or]). What teenager has not been corrected for saying [Me and Jennifer are going to the mall]? The standard story is that the object pronoun [me] does not belong in subject position -- no one would say [Me is going to the mall] -- so it should be [Jennifer and I]. People tend to misremember the advice as "When in doubt, say 'so-and-so and I', not 'so-and-so and me'," so they unthinkingly overapply it, resulting in hyper-corrected solecisms like [give Al Gore and I a chance] and the even more despised [between you and I].

But if the person on the street is so good at avoiding [Me is going] and [Give I a break], and even former Rhodes Scholars and Ivy League professors can't seem to avoid [Me and Jennifer are going] and [Give Al and I a chance], might it not be the mavens that misunderstand English grammar, not the speakers? The mavens' case about case rests on one assumption: if an entire conjunction phrase has a grammatical feature like subject case, every word inside that phrase has to have that grammatical feature, too. But that is just false.

[Jennifer] is singular; you say [Jennifer is], not [Jennifer are]. The pronoun [She] is singular; you say [She is], not [She are]. But the conjunction [She and Jennifer] is not singular, it's plural; you say [She and Jennifer are], not [She and Jennifer is.] So a conjunction can have a different grammatical number from the pronouns inside it. Why, then, must it have the same grammatical [case] as the pronouns inside it? The answer is that it need not. A conjunction is just not grammatically equivalent to any of its parts. If John and Marsha met, it does not mean that John met and that Marsha met. If voters give Clinton and Gore a chance, they are not giving Gore his own chance, added on to the chance they are giving Clinton; they are giving the entire ticket a chance. So just because [Al Gore and I] is an object that requires object case, it does not mean that is an object that requires object case. By the logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

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What's Your No. 1 Grammar Pet Peeve?

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