One thing I’ve been seeing more and more lately is the use of “suppose” instead of “supposed,” as in “It is suppose to snow a lot this weekend.” (It drives me almost as crazy as when people use “bias” as an adjective instead of “biased.”)
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Split infinitives
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I’ve learned to live with that one. Not splitting the infinitive in this case would sound stupid: The way really to fly? The way to fly really? That “rule” was a holdover from the Victorian era–and honestly, it’s one that I"m glad to see die.
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The “wrong place” for American English isn’t necessarily the “wrong place” for British English.
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I try to remember to ignore that one every now and then because I don’t think the official rule makes good logical sense.
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Oh come now, don’t be so prejudice.
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Well sure, but the example (and yours, oddly enough) was “American” because it had double q marks, instead of single ones. You see.
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One only ‘feels badly’ if the nerve endings in one’s fingers are damaged, not if one has sympathy for someone else’s misfortune and thus ‘feels bad’ for them.
I developed carpal tunnel syndrome with each pregnancy, thanks to the swelling, and I reveled in being able to say “I feel badly!” during those times, just to be a little stinker about it.
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Using “grammatical error” to mean using the wrong word. If for instance you mix up two nouns or two verbs, your sentence may be semantically incorrect, but it is still grammatically fine.
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I hate “is comprised of.” Why do people even bother using the word “comprise” if they don’t understand what it means?!
And don’t even get me started about “affect” and “effect.” Just use “impact;” it can be used both ways.
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Ahhh! Not only is the title killing me (they’re), but so is the intro (be bias)! Please tell me this was on purpose!
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We don’t make grammatical errors here on BoingBoing. If you see something that is grammatically incorrect, you can safely assume that it was done on purpose as a joke. It’s very meta, you see.
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“Should of” and “big of a” are usages I’ve always regarded – perhaps incorrectly – as American dialect, and I use them in my fiction to give various characters more of a distinctive voice. Fictional characters can speak however they want and it’s correct, of course.
Of course language is always changing. Various grammatical rules of English were invented by tight-arse scholars of the Victorian era to mimic Latin. Shakespeare used to split infinitives. If it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.
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How are you seeing “big of a” used?
Is “That’s too big of a change” not correct?
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Welcome to boingboing!
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One thing concerning apostrophes and plurals. Way back when I was learning this stuff, we were told that the plural of things like acronyms and numerals did use an apostrophe: “a pair of BVD’s” rather than “a pair of BVDs,” “the 1960’s” rather than “the 1960s,” “a dozen AR-15’s,” etc. Was I misinformed or have styles changed?
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I think that has indeed changed, and in a way that makes sense to me.
I’d use 1960’s in a way that refers just to that year: “Things weren’t like that in the 1960s when, say, 1960’s hairstyles differed radically from 1963’s.”
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My parents used to correct us on that all the time. We might say, “Me and mom went to the store.” My dad would reply with “What did Mean Mom buy?”
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