What’re Your Grammatical Pet Peeves (OR “Gee-Whiz” Facts…)?

Mine has to do with the misuse of negation, like with ‘all don’t’ vs. ‘not all do’. Someone will say something like, ‘all college students don’t go to Harvard’.

They should have said, ‘not all college students go to Harvard’.

As far as word origins go, one of my favorites is the origin of the word ‘vaccinate’. One of the biggest breakthroughs in medicine came from the development of the smallpox (also known as the Variola virus) vaccine. This was a horrible disease that had a high mortality rate and if it didn’t kill you, it could cause blindness and terrible scarring, disfigurement and other complications.

In the 18th century a British physician, Dr. Edward Jenner found that many people who worked on farms did not get infected with smallpox. The reason? They had previously been infected with cowpox from working with cows.

Cowpox is scientifically known as the Vaccinia virus. It is in the poxvirus family like smallpox is, but is a much milder disease.

Doctors and scientists at the time had some notion of the concept of immunization since it was well known at the time that once you had smallpox and survived, you were immune to future outbreaks. The problem was that they were using smallpox (albeit in a controlled manner) to immunize people from smallpox. The process was known as variolation and lots of people died as a result. Jenner’s discovery provided a much safer alternative.

Jenner’s efforts eventually led to the eradication of smallpox in 1979. The Variola virus only exists in laboratories.

The use of “arguably.” I hate it!

Most infuriating to me is when someone says, “As far as x …” and then leaves out the “is concerned” or even “goes” that one expects to come next. I feel like Roger Rabbit in the movie waiting for the “two bits!” response to the call of “shave and a haircut!”.

And what’s with “irregardless”?

Another thing I hate is when people start a sentence with “and”.

Even those who hate the idea of starting a sentence with “and” seem to do it themselves; reread the next-to-last paragraph of Mark’s post.

Sorry Guys, that was a little joke. I’m embarrassed about how weak it was now…

Off the subject, how many of you are old enough to have been vaccinated against smallpox?

My grammatical pet peeve is people who don’t appreciate the difference between grammar and usage claiming to be horrified, dismayed and disturbed by imagined violations that in fact do not break any actual rule and are perfectly good English.

I’ll cite just one source, today – Erik Wensberg’s revised edition of Wilson Follett’s “Modern American Usage” – because it is so readable, but there are plenty of other usage guides (Fowler, Garner, American Heritage to name a few) that agree with the following:

“A prejudice lingers from a bygone time that sentences should not begin with *and.* The supposed rule is without foundation in grammar, logic, or art.”

“The superstition that deplores the use of the *split infinitive* dates from the nineteenth century. But the practice — putting words, most often an adverb, between *to* and the verb — has gone on since the thirteenth. . . .Of the split construction, Bernard Shaw wrote: ‘Every good literary craftsman splits his infinitives when the sense demands it.’ ”

The sense of what Capt. Kirk had to say about the Starship Enterprise’s five-year mission demanded that he tell us it was “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” No other sequence of those words would achieve what Garner describes as the essential characteristic of good writing: a pleasant combination of sound and sense.

Damn the infinitives. Full split ahead.

Starting sentences with ‘and’ I can live with. Yes, yes, I know they’re not strictly correct, but at least they usually refer back to the previous sentence or paragraph.

What seems to have taken hold now is starting opening sentences of conversations or blog posts with ’so’. (“So I was reading the NY website the other day and I spotted an interesting article…” / “So what we did was to take two cells and combine them…”). It doesn’t link to anything that comes before, as nothing comes before. Very weird.

I don’t use it myself, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

It seems to be a recent thing, but it’s spreading like wildfire. Already it’s jumped the pond from US to the UK. I even heard some Libyan rebels using it on the BBC the other day.

As a teacher, one of my grammatical pet peeves is the incorrect use of “I vs me”. For example, “Carey and me have gone to the pumpkin patch twice this year.” To me, it is such an easy fix! Simply take away the accompanying noun, “Carey”, and ask yourself if “me have gone” sounds correct. Of course, it isn’t always this easy to identify which pronoun to use but I do think this strategy works more often than not.

Here’s one:
“That’s besides the point.”
Arrrgh! No. I’ve actually seen this misuse in a national TV commercial. Even high-profile writers sometimes fail to get it right.

Correct use is of course “Beside the point.”

I think the previous comments have summed up my “grammatical grudges” so to speak, but I do have to add one thing. I hate hate HATE when I hear frustrated pronounced FUStrated, It just sounds stupid and lazy to me, or as if the person is trying to sound cute. My ex-husband’s step mom always pronounced it that way, and I am almost certain that she did it to be cutsie. She sounded like an imbecile.

I also have a slight peeve when it comes to casually using emoticons at inappropriate times. I worked with one particular man who would routinely add smiley faces and other emoticons to official memos and communications. It just seems unprofessional. AND (ha ha) to even the score for the younger crowd, the worst offenders with the emoticons seem to be older folks. The co-worker I mentioned before was my BOSS at the time, and I often cringe when I see my mother do it. I won’t use them at all, they annoy me to no end!

I apologize if I made any of the offending mistakes here, I’m home in bed dealing with a bout of the flu and not exactly on my A-game.

FUStrated isn’t a common affectation here on the Texas Gulf Coast. While I sympathize with Frances’s viewpoint, I have to say that with a lot of people (yours truly all too often included), frustration and FUSSING (in the sense of nonstop infantile griping) are Siamese twins!

These days, “famous” and “unsavory” are pretty much unofficial synonyms themselves, right? I can’t remember the last time there was a major political election where half the voters didn’t feel they were choosing the lesser of two evils.

Before you award any word “now acceptable due to repeated use” status, though, consider that “language doesn’t turn on a dime. For sanity to prevail, there must be a period of time between shifts in rules of usage and punctuation and other elements of writing in which we respond to “Everybody else does it” the way a parent would react to that type of justification uttered by a willful teenager: ‘Well, if everybody else went and jumped off a cliff, would you?’” (From “The Right and Wrong of Writing,” http://www.dailywritingtips.com/the-right-and-wrong-of-writing/.) After all, at least as many people as not seem to think that “it’s” is a possessive.

Speaking of “universally accepted as the least of all available evils” labels, I’d put “they” as a singular neuter pronoun, and “aren’t I?,” in that category.

My biggest grammatical pet peeve is definitely the use of “towards.” Officially, towards is UK and toward is US. You’ve got to remember which side of the pond you’re writing for!

Also major for me is whether punctuation is inside the quotes or out — again it’s a matter of US vs. UK. Occasionally I can understand the mix up if it’s for clarity’s sake (which it sometimes seems to be in scientific work, for example).

A third would be the misuse of which and that.

PS. Has anyone else here read Woe Is I? by Patricia T. O’Conner? It’s by far my favorite grammar book and the one I always recommend to new writers and my editing clients.

I didn’t know about the billion thing—fascinating!

And I’m right with you on Woe Is I. After mentioning it here I googled her and found out she has a blog (score!) and several other books that have come out since (double score!) that I know have to buy….

A billion is 100 million in the UK? Well that’s news to me, and to everybody else on this side of the pond

In fact, a billion here is exactly the same as a billion in the US. It *used* to mean a million million, but that changed about 30 years ago, when we fell in line with US usage.

Our pint is different to yours though. It’s bigger – but maybe we can chat about that over a drink sometime…

An advertisement in this month’s issue of a national magazine touting the virtues of PEX plastic tubing states “Use PEX tubing over copper pipes.” My literal brain conjures up an image of a copper water pipe inside a plastic tube. I believe that the writer would have been better served by saying “Use PEX tubing instead of copper pipes.” Alternatively he/she could have said “Choose PEX tubing over copper pipe.

And so it goes.

I agree that “of” instead of “have” is grating, both to sensitive ears and to logical minds. Your post reminded me of the peculiar habit of a friend who used “in lieu of” to mean “in light of”–he should of studied French.

A common misconception among so many people these days is the usage of “kind of”. People always say, “Oh, it’s kind of hot outside.” When they should have said, “Oh, it’s rather/somewhat hot outside.” I’m not sure where this idiom is derived, but if you pay close attention nearly everyone uses it!

The good/well tidbit mentioned also bothers me.

Blegh!