Is anyone bothered by people using bad grammar?

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Perhaps it's a formal use of the plural second person e.g. use of "you" in early modern english

Presumptions of "poor grammar" are frequently if not invariably refuted by careful linguistic analysis. Languages are human constructs and the rules therefore exist to get the job done. Where "rules" are ignored, it means the listener is misapplying the rule and/or imposing an external standard which is no more significant than any other arbitrary convention.

Or "I've got."

I wonder why so many people use bad grammar? Didn't they learn it in school? I have learned it and puncuation (sp) and capital words since second grade. When I was in fifth grade, mine was at the seventh or eigth grade level, I don't remember which.


I admit I use bad grammar myself sometimes because I am trying to explain something but I don't know how so I might end up using bad grammar.

Oh, definitely!! ! It should be "I've gotten"

"I got something" is actually perfectly fine in the past tense., the problem is that people use it instead of "have" in the present perfect sense.

They learned it from mommy and daddy; babies and young children instinctively pick up the grammar they are exposed to, and once a non-standard grammar is learned it is very hard if not impossible to unlearn it one you start learning grammar in school, the non-standard grammar will always pop out in casual conversation.

Believe me, it bugs me when I make mistakes. Especially in chatrooms/IMs, since you can't just edit them =/

In IMs, spelling doesn't matter as long as it's readable. I am not going to sit here and type and have the other person waiting for my IM because I am making sure every word is spelled right. So it's faster to just type and not correct your mistakes. if anyone on there thought I really didn't know how to spell, I'd tell them to see my post on the forums and they will see what a much better speller I am because spelling matters on forums. I'm in no rush for posting is what.

I suppose the thing that annoys me isn't poor grammar per se. I just like to know that the person I'm talking to cares enough to make the effort to communicate clearly. Technically, it's poor grammar to end a sentence with a preposition. But there are cases where using proper grammar actually makes a sentence LESS readable - so, by all means, break the rule! And hey, if you type the word "freind" on accident, I know you meant "friend". It's cool.

But if I get a freeking migrane trying to figure out what you're saying, I'm prone to just give up. Happily, I haven't run into that here on WP.

And Hodor - I am also annoyed by the lack of a neuter, personal pronoun in English. However, the convention of using "they" for the singular makes the sentence sound so bizarre. And it sounds particularly bad in short sentences: "They eats the pizza." If I use "he", I feel sexist. If I use "she", people assume I must be talking about a female, when I may not be. If I use "he/she" and "her/him", it interrupts the flow and sets a cold, technical, politically correct tone! Maybe we should adopt a word like "se"

I agree, English is in desperate need of neuter 3st-person singular pronouns, He and She both are unvoiced fricative consonants follows by a long E so the new word should be the same, so it would be "Fe" or "Se"

I get annoyed mainly when people speak badly, like saying 'pacific' instead of 'specific', thats annoying, though i will admit that i talk differently depending on the environment, such as right now im using my mildly formal standard, whereas at school i use slang and lots of swearing, but its kind of automatic, i seem to lower my intellectual threshhold down to the level of the people im speaking to, or vice-versa for more intelligent people

Well, the rule that states that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition came from 18th century grammarians who were trying to 'tidy up' the English language. They used the logic that, since it's impossible to finish a sentence with a preposition in Latin, then it shouldn't be done in English either, because Latin was, apparently, the highest developed language in existence. This is complete nonsense.

Okay, sometimes it's bad style and clumsy to finish some sentences with a preposition, but the rule in general is an artificial one. As you said, making the sentence readable and unambiguous is the crucial thing.

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As for the gender-neutral pronoun issue, several have been proposed: co, sie, xe, ve, ze, mer, tey, e, thon, shey and yo. Interestingly, "co" is used in contemporary everyday language by the 100 people who live at Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, USA. It is used to mean "s/he" in the case in which the gender is not known or is irrelevant.

There are also reports of students in Baltimore, Maryland, USA consistently using "yo" as a gender-neutral pronoun.

It will be interesting to see if any of them catch on and become part of Standard English. Meanwhile, we're stuck with 'he/she,' singular 'they' and using awkward word order to avoid using pronouns at all.

The English grammarians of the 18th and 19th centuries were elitist twits, the morons who who went to war against "ain't" just because they didn't understand it's origin as a perfectly reasonable contraction of "am not." I don't have a problem with language change, I have a problem with too much language change in different directions in different areas because it makes it hard for people to understand each other. I have great trouble understanding African-American English, for example.

Actually, they are STILL against it, and ain't is NOT reasonable. amn't? I could see how someone could change it to ain't, but STILL. And HOW do you explain its use elsewhere like "You ain't going to do that" or "You ain't going to do nothing". Even YOUR claim falls apart like tissue paper in a waterfall in light of that!

BTW there IS a neuter pronoun.

One can always say that one can do this, or that. There is ALSO the passive voice. "This, or that, can be done.".

The only reason why ain't isn't part of Standard English is because the prescriptivist grammarians decided against allowing it, presumably because it was restricted to certain dialects. Any dialect other than good old Standard Southern English was frowned upon and considered to be inferior and provincial.

Okay, so ain't can now mean 'are not' as well as 'am not,' but that's a more recent development. Odin is right about the origin of the contraction.

One exists as a sort of gender-neutral pronoun, but it sounds stilted and formal. Consider the sentence If one wants to do well in one's assignment, one should research about one's chosen topic. It sounds awful.

Rephrasing the sentence by using the passive voice to avoid using any pronouns at all is always an option, but some people criticise the passive voice for being bad style. As the saying goes: The passive voice should always be avoided.

Looks like this is a case of the "experts" acting as gatekeepers (and presumably trying to make themselves authorities), rather than studying language as it's used, which would be their job. [sarcasm] How dare those filthy peasants try to adapt the language they use every day so that it suits their purposes! [/sarcasm]

If I'm checking an academic paper, and I see "ain't", someone's losing points. Likewise, if I'm teaching conversational English, my students would be taught what "ain't" means, in context with the culture that produced it. I'm all for people owning the language they use... but students should learn many facets of their language, and be expected to recognize social context, not just taught the King's English.



"One" is impersonal, and is a pronoun, but it also implies a person who has not been identified, or that can can be ANYONE. It's not the same as "he" or "she", which refers to a person who has been identified:

When Sue is hungry, she eats food.
When Sue is hungry, one eats food. (Genderless, and a pronoun, but does not refer to Sue.)