My peeve is the way people use “myself”. I hear “Myself and Bob went…” So often, I’m wondering if I’m in the wrong!!
But then again, feel free to correct “myself”!
^ Good exceptions from @Hunt
The English language evolves and changes, and what the language police forget is that English itself is a mishmash of parts that often aren’t compatible with each other, the latin grammar that makes up a good part of English is put together with Germanic linguistic roots, and they aren’t the same thing. English grammar rules is an oxymoron, because so often the exceptions are bigger than the rules, and you basically learn grammar by picking it up and memorizing it. I can remember an English teacher in 7th grade going bonkers over the use of the word “since” as a synonym for “because”, when of course "since’ means measured against a unit of time, like “I haven’t had a bad case of heartburn since the last time I ate a white castle hamburger”, not “I don’t eat White Castle Hamburgers since they give me indigestion”…she practically had a stroke when someone pointed out that they used since on the SAT like that. The English language in the US has also consolidated over the years, we get rid of British conventions like putting a U in everything (colour, anyone?), we have created our own set of contractions. We also take in slang, too, words like “cool”, “Hip”, “Hot”, “Bad”, have new meanings, “disrepected” or “dissed” were street slang that have become common.
There was a fantastic cartoon done by the MGM film animation division, where this 1940’s hepster dies and goes to heaven, and is met by St. Peter, who can’t understand a thing he says,so he gets Daniel Webster to interpret, and of course you see Webster envisioning what the guy is saying literally, as in “my baby and I cut a rug” and you see him with a baby taking scissors to a rug…lol.
It is very hard to claim proper grammar when the rules are almost revealed knowledge, not logical rules. If we wanted proper rules and grammar, we should switch the US to Esperanto.
I remember that cartoon–the guy also did a stretch in the jug.
I think one reason “less” and “fewer” blur together is that there aren’t many situations in which the reader or hearer would be confused if you used the “wrong” word.
@Hunt, the reason “less” can be used with things like distance or time is because the units are not discrete. You can walk for 2.4 miles or for 2.4 hours, but it would be hard to load 2.4 items into your cart at the grocery store. The grocery store items are distinct and countable. The distance or time is not unless you are measuring in such as a way that you could only use the distance or time in whole units, in which case you’d use “fewer.”
@Sue22, that’s logical, but it may really be just that this usage is idiomatic. You would also say that something costs less than fifty cents.
Quiz question–does the following sentence seem wrong? “There are 100,000 grains of rice in this sack, or possibly a bit more or a bit less.”
Anyone remember the grammar book, Eats Shoots and Leaves? It opens with this joke…
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“Well, I’m a panda,” he says. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
This drives me nuts too - but unfortunately I don’t have any Grammar Police Energy to expend on this matter. I’m too busy with its/it’s and their/there/they’re.
Yes, the sentence seems wrong. Rice is measured by bulk measurement units – like pounds and kilos – not number of grains. 
Fortunately for most people, there aren’t that many jobs that demand a proper understanding of the language.
Unfortunately for some people, there are a few that do, and they are often the most desirable ones.
Not knowing proper grammar pales as a disqualifiying characteristic in comparison to the rampant math and logic illiteracy that exists, even among college graduates.
Back to the grammar policing, most athletes today have been told never to use “me” when speaking, so “I” and “myself” turn up repeatedly where “me” ought to be.
Part of it is the niggling details behind some of this and also similarities in sound. The one that gets me, and I’ll be the first to admit it, it then and than, and in common usage they have been blurred, as has been the bane of every Catholic school student with a nun with a ruler, who and whom.
Linguistically, one of the reasons that the grammar police have it wrong is something in how languages are defined. When I took computer science, in theory of computation we learned the Chomsky hierarchy of grammars, which without getting into the computer geek ruminations on it (that drive me nuts, because it was meant to describe human languages), there are classes of language that roughly translate to regular, rule based languages and those with context in them to some extent. English is most definitely a context based language, and the reality of grammar is that with the words in dispute, like less or fewer, people pick up from context what the other person is saying. It may be that less is an absolute mathematical value and fewer is a relative value (ie 5 is less than 6, but 6 apples are fewer than 7), but when I say something like “less kids are applying to colleges”, in the context of college admissions, in context, less as an absolute number makes no sense, but using it as a synonym for fewer does. It is interesting that we don’t do it the other way, user fewer in place of less, I don’t think in math someone would say 5 is fewer than 6 (unless talking discrete objects), so it often I would hazard a guess is the more concrete term taking over for the less specific one. Anyway, because English is context based, a lot, the rules become less and less meaningful. In Latin or latin derived languages, such things are more of a ‘crime’ because the basis of the language is rules, that isn’t true in English linguistically or otherwise.
However, if you want to make yourself feel better, look up Weird Al’s “word crimes” video, enough to make a grammar cop feel good:)
The mistake that I encounter most on Facebook is the misuse of your/you’re.
For instance, “Your cool” is wrong.
My cool? I own a cool? Fantastic!
hehe
Former editor here, too. What’s driving me crazy lately is seeing “that” used instead of “who.” When describing a human, “who” is correct:
“Mary is the one that took the last piece of cake” instead of “Mary is the one who…”
Glad to get that off my chest. Maybe I should have put in it the “Say it here” thread. But, I will always be on the side of the Grammar Police. At my job (no longer in publishing), I’m referred to as “Grammar ,” partly because I’m one of the older members of the team, and my colleagues like the fact that it sounds like “grandma.” 8-|
^^^See, I had to edit my own post.
Times do change, though. I recently had to give up putting two spaces after the period.
So here’s the thing: when commas are in the wrong places (especially when you use homonyms), confusions may arise. Pretty much zero people will be confused if you use “less” rather than “fewer” and vice versa. In fact, English speakers survived for centuries without the word “fewer”: http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/12/less-fewer.html
Are we going to tell all those English-speakers in the 16th century that their grammar was wrong even though they could clearly get their point across.
English has a lot of these useless “rules” basically because snobbish language fobs wanted to ape Latin and French in the 18th century.
I have to join in on this one. Worked with a guy who always corrected me on less and fewer and so it became something that I an now very picky about. I am very happy when the supermarket sign says 15 or fewer items (I have seen this on occasion).
The one usage that seems tricky is the “one less” (as in the song “one less bell to answer, one less egg to fry”.) I have read on grammar sites that you can use less instead of fewer in this particular context even though it is referring to a countable item. Do other grammarians agree?
My pet peeves…
Written: “would of / should of / could of”
Both spoken and written: erroneously using “begs the question” to mean “suggest the question”
The latter is well on its way to widespread acceptance, enabled by all you descriptive types who won’t stand up to this crime against language. I even see that error made by people who should know better (journalists, writers, commentators).
I agree. “One fewer” sounds wrong to me. This may be an example of an idiomatic usage.
Re: shined v. shone - If I paid someone to make my shoes sparkle, would you say they “shone” or “shined” my shoes. “Shone” never occurred to me.
My pet peeve is receiving an invite.