I was taught that you need an apostrophe for '60s, but not for 1960s.
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I was surprised to consistently see “should of” in Terry Pratchett’s prose - I found it grating.
Along with its/it’s, then/than and all the usual ones, I’ll propose another one:
Depreciated instead of deprecated.
I know it’s not exactly a grammar error, bit it still annoys me.
Disclaimer: not a native English speaker. In fact, I learned French before English.
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“Begs the question” should probably just be abandoned, since when you use it wrong, it’s wrong, but when you use it correctly it feels wrong and people generally don’t understand what you’re saying.
Folks should just say “raises the question” or “assumes the argument is right without supporting it” as relevant.
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I thought that was the problem they were pointing out?
Though maybe the exterior full-stoo is a tip off that the poster is an angry Brit who prefers the term “inverted commas” to “quotation marks.”
Perhaps they have consulted the Cambridge or Merriam-Webster dictionaries, which both list “comprise = compose” as a valid definition, with example sentences using the phrase “comprised of.”
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Quote marks (double or single) and position of full stop (period) or comma are typesetting conventions from different style manuals.
If confused I normally defer to Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style.
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“Too big of a change” is a good example. It’s not used in the UK. We would say, “Too big a change.”
I first heard the phrase by my new boss some years ago, who was American. He was very well educated, so I suppose it’s dialect. I’m not saying it’s wrong, just another interesting difference between British and American English.
Another example is “Anyways”, used by my daughter (partly American educated) and my current boss (largely South African educated) instead of “Anyway”, which is what British people would normally say.
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So does that mean that you can’t have too much of a good thing in British English?
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We do say that. It’s the “big of a” phrase we don’t use.
Isn’t language strange and interesting?
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Somehow I do not think you were being deliberately/ironically obtuse there - I suspect you meant it. Forgive me if I have misinterpreted. If I have, then the following is a primer for anyone else who may need it.
The item inside the quotation marks is part of the sentence - it is within the sentence. Thus the sentence should end with a full stop, not the second of a pair of quotation marks. That’s just logical.
It is only if an entire sentence is within quotation marks that such a sentence’s full stop would be within the quotation marks.
If there IS an ‘official’ rule (in the USA? Because I suspect no British English writer would do that) that says what @anon15383236 wrote is correct then it was invented arbitrarily by a fuckwit who thought they were an expert but who clearly was not, and who, as you imply, had an entirely faulty logic circuit.
That’s just nonsense.
We Brits use double Q marks just as much as anyone else. Whatever gave you the idea Brits only use singe Q marks? Or are you being deliberately ‘ironic’ again and I’ve misinferred?
[doubled up with laughter again]
Ye gods! No, it is very much NOT correct!!! The correct usage is “too big a change”. Whereas “too much of a change” is correct. (You obviously missed my comment at post number 7 in this thread.)
It seems to me this is a pretty recent USian usage development - I’d say I only noticed it within the last 5 years or so, maybe 10.
ETA It seems it is indeed recent but not as recent as I thought. See link below.
That is correct because the second two usages there are possessives, not plurals. The only plural that comes to mind where there is a problem with not inserting an apostrophe is the plural of ‘do’ as a noun. (As in ‘a leaving do’.) There were several leaving dos? Several leaving does"? Several leaving do’s - well it seems to be the only thing that denotes the intended meaning, sadly.
They’re talking about a completely different apostrophe. 1960’s versus 1960s, or 60’s versus 60s.
I doubt you ever saw it other than as quoted speech by a character who would have spoken that way. Terry was a consummate writer and knew how to write correct grammar.
This also drives me mad. The word is anyway. It has no plural.
Of course, it must be acknowledged that “Britain and America Are Two Nations Divided by a Common Language”.
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Merry Christmas
I’ve been seeing 's (dog’s instead of dogs) in pluralization a lot recently, among native speakers. Don’t get where that’s coming from.
Also “should of” / “could of”. It’s like you don’t understand the language you’re writing.
With any of these though, just take the extra few seconds to go over it and fix mistakes before you post. It’s only polite.
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I’ll check in my e-books and report back. I am quite sure to have seen it outside of quoted speech, hence my surprise!
Thank you. 
I note page 150 and note that they do not deal with the case as per the example used earlier in this thread.
All style guides are merely someone’s view of correct grammar (the clue is in the use of the term ‘style’) and a posh university printer/publisher is no more immune from error’s of style than any other.
The first edition of his Rules was a slim twenty-four-page booklet just over 5 by 3 inches, first produced in 1893. It was originally intended only for printing-house staff of the Clarendon Press, the learned imprint of Oxford University Press. The title page plainly stated that the booklet contained ‘Rules for Compositors and Readers, which are to be observed in all cases where no special instructions are given’. Since the Press printed a good deal of work for other publishers, with house styles of their own to be followed, Hart’s instructions were from the very first to be used by default, in the absence of directions to the contrary, rather than imposed unilaterally as a Procrustean diktat.
instances will occur in which the advice given here may not be the best choice, and the prudent author or editor will act accordingly.
If it exists (which I will be gobsmacked at) I very much doubt it came from the typewriter of Terry. But publishing is a process with many interference points.
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That seems to be the result of overzealous autocorrect on smartphones. My phone always wants to add apostrophes for no reason.
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Lately I’ve really been noticing the subject/verb disagreement and it doesn’t drive me crazy, but it grates a bit (even though I fall prey to it as well!)
Things like, “there’s two reasons why,” or “here’s six recipes for the holidays.”
So much this. So many of my posts here end up with “we’re” instead of “were” because of the autocorrect bias and exuberance.
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Oh, there IS a reason. (Something, something fuckwits at Apple/Google)
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When you have a sentence that starts out with “The number of people who,” it becomes easy to overlook the wrong verb in the main clause.
Well it depends on the context of course.
What annoys me now is people over-correcting in the case of “me” vs “I”. eg. “Could you get he and I a drink”.
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“For all intensive purposes…”
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