Grammar Gripes and Other Psycholinguistic Squawkings

There are so many english teachers in my family that grammar was forced upon me. I don't mind it when co-workers make grammatical mistakes, but when superiors and upper-management make stupid mistakes, it tends to drive me insane. The other day I saw this:

"Do to the following policy changes.... " Seriously? Do vs Due?

One thing that does make me cringe is this new fascination with making plural things singular.

Example:

Person 1: "I can't seem to find the sweaters."

Person 2: "There's plenty of sweaters over here" Should be "There are plenty of sweaters over here" Multiple sweaters... use the plural.

 

"Off-ten."

"One of the only."

 

Using "sell" as a noun and "sale" as a verb (the latter seems to be the more frequent mistake). I work as a sales assistant and see this error often in emails, memos, and even signage in retail locations. It drives me batshit crazy. I don't consider myself a member of the grammar or spelling police, but hell's bells...

 

Joe Quarterback lead his team to victory... AAAAARGH! It's LED, you moron, he LED his team to victory. LEAD, when pronounced like that, is used in a pencil, and I don't think a pencil LED his team to victory.

 

I don't understood what you mean by this

 

"this may sound cliche"

 

One that always jars me is "off of" (the man got off of his horse). This, to me, reads perfectly as "the man got off his horse". What is that "of" for?

This one seems to be a very American usage - you rarely see it in "English" books.

Maybe our in-house editor can shed some light on this one?

 

Here's a personal pet peeve of mine: the conventional and all-too-frequent use of "impact" as a verb is wrong. It may be acceptable now, but back when I was a younger lass, impact was not a verb unless you were talking about teeth.

Also, the amount of deliberately misspelled textspeak circulating among young people and subsequently being passed off as real language these days makes me fearful for our future.

(HEY YOU KIDS, GET OFF MY LAWN.)

 

For starters, apologies for posting comments in this thread.

It confuses me every time, I notice native speakers mistaking with to-too, then-than, could of-could have etc.

Very useful information here.

 

How about IF YOU WILL....If I will friggin what?
There are more, but I have the "old timers" disease...(they'll eventually register, takes time...us old guys have punch card memory, need to wait for the card to kick out.) Hmmm, do you young un's even remember punch cards?

 

Screw that... on our educational forums, we're all referred to as MAs and PhDs. And that's by professors who have those titles.
And the motherfreaking APA. If they can call us "PhDs" than y'all can, too.
And that's y'all not ya'll or yall. It's a bastardization of "you all". I bust out my all-a-yuz just to piss off the New Yorkers who "ya'll" me to death.