Is anyone else completely bound to prescriptive grammar?

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Some of us have a verbal impairment; we're not all super-literate "aspies". Some of us never had a proper education due to who we are. Some of us lack the ability to teach ourselves due to a dysfunction in the part of the brain that starts/plans things. Some of us just don't care.

Some of us are all of the above (see: me).

I worked for a computer place (for two horrible days) that employed a full-time advertising girl. The ads she put in the paper were usually chock-full of spelling errors.

I was appalled! I asked her if she was aware of her spelling mistakes all over the ads and she didn't have a coherent response - she was too busy being frothing-at-the-mouth angry! The boss didn't care in the least either... the logic was, "Noone ELSE says anything - so who cares about spelling anyway? What makes you so sure your spelling is right either?"

I groaned inside as I watched humanity take one more pace backwards.

Haha, none taken. It's one of the house rules - it's the forum of a magazine used widely in secondary schools, so we have to keep to some kind of guidelines or teachers get on our backs about it. Spelling mistakes are fine (because let's face it, not everyone can spell to save themselves!) Bt Wn aN nTiR FrUm RdZ LyK dIs ItZ JuS a Bt mCh U c?! Ne MeAnIn GtZ lSt iN TnSlTioN...

Why, whatever do you mean?



Yes, I like to write my posts in such a way that I wouldn't mind if they were published in print. It actually takes more of my energy to avoid using grammatically correct English. Or, at the very least, what I consider to be correct.

I'm trying to lose the word 'actually' from my vocabulary.

You have "less" of an uncountable noun (like milk--you can have some milk or no milk or more milk, but not two milks or three milks) but "fewer" of a countable noun (like eggs--you can have one egg or two eggs or three eggs).

I think the most common misuse is probably with people, for example you might hear or read "This year, less people bought a house than last year" when it should be "fewer" because people is a countable noun (one person, two people, three people).

Definitely. One would think that spending ten years on the internet would have made me a bit more relaxed by now, but that is hardly the case. If anything, the constant (unnecessary) mutilation of the English language has, in my eyes, grown more exasperating. I can handle a few minor grammatical faux pases, such as improper usage of semicolon and quotations, not double-spacing after the end of a sentence, lack of indentation (nearly impossible in some cases). I'm guilty of a few here and there, but that's just laziness on my part. There are, however, some crimes against language which are truly unforgivable.

Don't get me started on "netspeak". All caps, numerical substitutions for words, and block paragraphs are a thorn in my side. I refuse to read anything written like this, and for that matter, often the writing is so hideous that I can't read it.

Then there are there are the misspellings of simple words.

Theyre friend (their)
It's over their (there)
Went too the store (to)

This week I have seen (more than a few times):

Babby (baby), cheractor (character), sequal (It's SEQUEL! Does ANYBODY know how to spell this correctly?!), funner (not a word), rize (rise), etc.

Some people also feel that they are above punctuation. I mean, using ANY punctuation. I simply loathe run-on sentences.

I have also seen this trend moving into advertising. "where you at?" comes to mind. Then again, when I was a kid I was irritated by "toys r us" (precursor to netspeak?) and hated businesses that attempted to be cute by intentionally misspelling words.

Oh, and I've been called stupid for using big, scary words. For some reason I think when people can't understand one of those big words, they take it as a sign of aggression and feel the need to retaliate.

To some extent, yes, but I'm relaxed on the internet, and on occasion I finish a sentence as follows!!!one!!11

Because I can.

My English does tend to get lazy, and it's also fairly heavily... Wisconsinated? I am definitely guilty of using the expression "You wanna go with?".

I do have a few pet peeves of my own though, especially when people say "borrow" where they should say "lend". I have no business acting like the grammar police when I know mine is terrible, but using words in the wrong context annoys the hell out of me.

Also:
"irregardless"
"more ______-ier"
"theoretically", in the wrong context
"over-exaggerated"

I am very pedantic about language and will correct other people if they say something grammatically incorrect, for which everyone hates me .

Ah, yes, the old "choice of word"-issue. I have that.
I normally throw a tantrum if someone, even on tv, says the word "amoral".
I hate that word. I hate it a great deal.
It's supposed to be "immoral".
"Amoral" is utter nonsense. Nonsense that I find strongly offensive.

Actually, amoral does have a meaning separate from immoral. A person is amoral if they are not psychologically bound to the idea of morals, whereas an immoral person is bound to said ideals, but chooses to rashly defy them. An action is amoral if it is not addressed by a certain moral code (the wearing of pink is considered amoral), whereas an immoral action defies this moral code (murder is immoral).

I became deathly familiar with these terms when I did Lincoln-Douglass debate. Our resolutions were "The United States has a moral obligation to ....." (states are arguably amoral entities; only people are bound to morals) and "The use of eminent domain to promote private enterprise is unjust." (to disprove this, I only had to prove that said use was not unjust; I did not have to justify it.).

Other misused words:
"Proverbial" refers to a proverb, not a metaphor.
"Moral" refers to an absolute statement of the nature of an action based solely on the properties of the action itself and the one who commits it, whereas "Ethical" address the consequence of the action. (It is immoral for catholics to masturbate, while it is unethical to rape others.)
"Practically" does not mean almost, but rather that something is so close to being true that it may be addressed as true for all practical purposes.
"You" is second person. "One" is third person indefinite. One should not use "you" when making a general statement of what others ought to do.

Last edited by dongiovanni on 09 Dec 2007, 3:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I speak very informally online [write?], and on MSN, my grammar really is a bit worse than I am capable of, but offline, my writing is very formal and 'stilted'. I talk more casually with people I know well, but most people comment on how I speak 'too' eloquently, i.e. I don't shy away from multisyllabic words...

hmm...see..now I think it would be 'the United States have'...but that's me, I have minor problems with grammar and spelling..

I did noone for a long time, maintennance, etc. Sometimes it just takes Word's online spell check to flush these out..

I hang out at an art site, and creativity seeps from the artwork right into the titles and grammar...sometimes the irony is delicious..

'same difference' used to make me fulminate back in the day...it implied a comparison of 3 objects or categories....

I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused...

The U.S. is an odd term. It GENERALLY refers to ONE COUNTRY(it has), but CAN refer to its parts(they have). That distinction is one case where grammar can make things clearer.

I heard it said that, before the civil war, people said 'The United States are...' After the civil war, they said 'The United States is...'

My grammar is far from perfect, but my pet peeve is the misuse of the semicolon.