I love this thread. Someone already mentioned the overuse of “literally”. That one drives me crazy but even more so when it is pronounced “litrally”.
Lay vs. lie… My son was in a college English class and after the instructor tried to explain this rule several times with no luck, my son popped his head up off his desk (knowing him well he was probably napping and heard this discussion only subconsciously) and said “chickens lay eggs and people lie down”. We all grew up with this bit of knowledge courtesy of my mom.
“I’m waiting on you” instead of “I’m waiting for you” is another one that really bugs me! Are you waiting on top of me???
As a side note, adding to this thread is a bit intimidating as I am afraid I will make a mistake.
Lie vs. lay is a thing that I really have trouble with. I have looked it up multiple times, but it doesn’t seem to stick in my brain. With any luck, that “chickens lay eggs” will help me.
But once you get into the past tense and other tenses of those verbs, a whole minefield awaits…
It was not. There are posts and threads here nearly every day that misuse those two words (do a search). I did not see any current title at the time that contained the error - probably just saw it in a post for the umpteenth+ time.
Zipyourlips, you know what they say about the word “assume” and “ass” and “U and ME”. And here you are, going around complaining about this multiple times on this thread and others… Sheesh.
That’s the way language myths get started; imperious middle-school teachers corrupt innocent young minds with nonsensical rules. It should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t: there is nothing wrong with the use of the term “done” to refer to the completion of a human task. I mean, really! Jeez Louise!
P.S. If this thread is good for anything, it has made me glad that I didn’t chuck my 20-volume set of the OED (as I was tempted to do when downsizing from a big house to a small one).
The OED cites, among others, Thomas Jefferson and Ruskin for the sense of “to be done” that was denounced by Surfcity’s poor kid’s middle-school teacher. You ought to publish the teacher’s name so that we could all send him or her outraged letters.
“And (I think this may have already been mentioned here) “comprised” being misused such that “composed of” is becoming replaced by “comprised of” ('cuz it sounds so much more intelligent, don’cha know?)”
“Comprised of” is a patentese term used to describe an open-ended composition. For example, “a silverware set comprised of forks and knives” may optionally have spoons under some circumstances. No wonder scientists do not like to read patents!
Here is another example:
Funny joke/story for you…a farm kid visits Harvard and gets lost on campus while looking for the library. He asks a well dressed, typically ‘upper-crusty student’ “can ya please tell me where the library is at?”. Peering down his nose, the Harvard student chastises " At Havard we don’t end our sentences with prepositions." Farm boy, without missing a beat, says “Gee, I’m sorry. Can you tell me where the library is at, A-****?”
The first grammar war I’m aware of took place in the Roman Republic and involved accusations of the degradation of the language. I don’t care: language is a living thing.
I do care about clarity and many people confuse correctness with clarity. The trick to communication is to convey what you mean. That sometimes means “simple declarative sentences” as was beaten into us, but it sometimes means an entire chapter in As I Lay Dying consists of “My mother is a fish”, which conveys nothing clearly but a ton indirectly. Salinger was a model of clarity in his short stories but he infused them with ambiguity of meaning that keeps them relevant. Alice Munro is also a model of direct writing except what she’s actually writing about is obliquely approached.
I recently had a typically odd conversation with a Russian friend. If you don’t have experience talking with Russians who grew up there, the language is so different they tend to analyze American sayings in a way that we don’t. We talked about “all set”, as in Americans say “I’m all set” and Russians want to know “all set to what exact extent?”. They read context differently. That’s a problem my oldest, who speaks Chinese, says is the real problem with hearing Chinese: that so many words sound so similar you often need to know what they’re talking about to know what they’re talking about. As you can see, I love repetitions, but I don’t take it as far as as Gertrude Stein.
I also love dialect. Growing up in Detroit, which had at the time a very large Southern population (black and white) - now a generation further removed from those roots - we heard Southern black speech mannerisms all the time. Lots of “I’m a-fixin’” and “we be fine”. Those sound ignorant in the abstract but they were dialect reflecting a place of origin. They weren’t necessarily more ignorant than the Eastern European gibberish my old relatives might mangle with English.
Or as I often remember, when we’d arrive at camp each morning we’d sing “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” I understand the Marines sang that in the Pacific during WWII. Each repetition changes the meaning. It’s a terrible grammatical structure with 3 repetitions of “because” but it conveys meaning.
No wonder scientists do not like to read patents!