<p>Marite: sadly, I expect you are right. </p>
<p>Does that mean that I have to accept its/it’s with an apostrophe as a possessive? I really don’t want to.</p>
<p>Neither do I! I fear, however, that disinterested, to mean uninterested, is here to stay, as are other word usages that I find objectionable.</p>
<p>
“I shall fight them upon the landing grounds and upon the airfields…and I’ll hit 'em over the head with bloody beer bottles.” --Winston Churchill, 1935, when asked his opinion on a point of common but incorrect usage. He later recycled his comments in WW II.</p>
<p>A rather ambiguous use of "“bloody,” wouldn’t you say?</p>
<p>'odsblood, madam. The Brits are inclined that way, thought it’s often dressed as understatement, a particular form of ambiguity, mathematically speaking. Culturally speaking, I think the Brits caught ambiguity from the French. Compare the press reports from Agincourt & Crecy.</p>
<p>Ah, those press reports! Talk about misspelling. It’s Azincourt. they can’t say it right, they can’t spell it right even if they did win the battle. :(</p>
<p>I thought it was Marco Polo that went to the Azin Court. Now I’m confused.</p>
<p>Azin or Azn or Asian, supposedly he did not.<br>
But Agincourt should really be Azincourt. If you take the cross-Channel ferry (does anyone still do so?) you drive past the town.</p>
<p>This could be the thread that never dies.</p>
<p>How about a statue of limitations? (Is there a torch involved?)</p>
<p>Another favorite…anywayS. When I hear it I cringe.</p>
<p>In my student papers:</p>
<p>now a days
now in days</p>
<p>Grammar peeve: “Although” followed by a comma. As in “Although, they all write it that way.”</p>
<p>Just this minute, I opened up a student research paper on “Capitol Punishment.”</p>
<p>Hysterical-- as in “That movie was hysterical!”</p>
<p>Garland:</p>
<p>Have you encountered gorilla warfare and pheasant revolutions? </p>
<p>Statue of Limitations: Don’t give me your illegal immigrants.
Capitol Punishment: It’s what happens to congressmen who violate ethics regulations (but only when they are enforced).</p>
<p>Some kid who posted a chances thread on the Princeton board repeatedly mentioned a class called “Calculas”. Maybe I’m a language snob, but is someone who can’t even spell “calculus” (or, for that matter, “extraciricular”) really the caliber of student that Princeton is looking for? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>How about those sacrosanct “reporters” on public radio (a sinister lot if there ever was one) - ; ) - who end their daily reports with “My pleasure.”, even when he or she has just recounted yet another example of man’s inhumanity towards others! It is of course perfectly right to say but it still makes me seethe… what sort of “pleasure” is that?!</p>
<p>lol </p>
<p>Extra-circular activities make for a well-rounded student. ;)</p>
<p>And speaking of radio announcers, just yesterday I heard one (on public radio!) refer to a composer “waxing rhapsodically” about something.</p>
<p>The composer was probably wiping the floor with someone else :)</p>
<p>Although this one’s wrong, it somehow makes me smile: “That would be a whole nother thing.”</p>
<p>Andy Rooney, a graduate of Union College, said the hardest part of getting his degree was learning to spell “Schenectady”. “Rensselaer” is definitely a challenge since even when it’s spelled correctly, it looks wrong.</p>
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<p>I agree with your English teachers. One way to think about it: “myriad” is the Greek word for the number 10,000. So you would say “ten thousand choices” and not “a ten thousand of choices.”</p>
<p>But surely there is a distinction between having a myriad of choices and having myriads of choices. 
</p>
<p>I think the pedantry comes from how English usually uses numbers to count count nouns. If I think HARD about a parallel example phrase to the one above, I suppose I would write, “having a hundred choices and having hundreds of choices.” In other words, counting the hundreds to show that there is exactly one hundred, with the indefinite article, drops out the “of” before the word actually being counted, while leaving that word in the plural requires the “of” to be idiomatic. But to that I would say, bosh, “myriad” is a different word from “hundred,” and comes from a foreign language, and it is entitled to have its own idiomatic construction with “of” in the singular or in the plural. </p>
<p>How many of the people posting here have had formal study of Greek? The languages I have studied formally, besides English, include but are not limited to German, Russian, Chinese (four different modern Sinitic languages, and the classical literary language), Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek, Koine Greek, and Japanese. Through self-study I’ve learned something about a few more languages. </p>
<p>After edit: Ah! The light bulb went on. “Myriad” works exactly like “lot.” You can have “a lot of choices,” and “lots of choices,” and either phrase is correct and idiomatic English.</p>