Well if a purpose isn’t intensive, what good is it!
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Pah! Those gadflies? What does the OED say?
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Thanks, I use ‘whilst’, but I’m English born, so feel I’m entitled to use it.
“Oh, there IS a reason. (Something, something fuckwits at Apple/Google)”
Nothing to do with it. Any spellcheck system will get it wrong, it’s up to the user to check their spelling to make sure what they’re typing is correct. I’m doing this on my iPad, which has put the correct ‘66/99’ quote marks in. It also regularly anticipates the next word or two I’m going to use. That’s down to training it over the last ten years.
It also helps that I worked in print and publishing for over twenty years, and designed books, cast off type from the manuscript, proofread the typesetting right through the whole process up to the print proofs.
That’s not to say I don’t frequently get it wrong, but my spellcheck thesaurus gets it right more often than not.
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There seems to be an increasing confusion between “to” and “too” recently, and it throws me off every time I see the wrong one used. 
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i think because saying there’s or here’s sounds better than the muddle of there’re or here’re 
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When people say “less” when “fewer” is more appropriate.
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Combining phrasal verbs into a single word.
I login only when I’m ready to checkout, so I always have to lookup my password.
Backup the truck after you setup the campsite.
The confusion arises when the same words are combined to form a noun or adjective (“login credentials,” “checkout counter,” “result of the lookup,” “backup plan,” “a police setup”). A key to getting it right is to consider what would happen when you conjugate the verb for a different tense (“I logged in once I was ready…” not “I loginned…”).
foxwhowood:
Way back when I was learning this stuff, we were told that the plural of things like acronyms and numerals did use an apostrophe… Was I misinformed or have styles changed?
Styles have changed. In the 1960’s and ’70’s, we were supposed to mind our p’s and q’s. In the 2010s and ’20s, we mind our ps and qs.
(That was remarkably hard to type in Markdown.)
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But those are people from the future!
I read about in an electronic mail message. I mean an e-mail. I mean an email.
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I got word of it via my cellular telephone!
Alert the press!
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Came here to mention who/whom. No one uses whom correctly. It drives me nuts. I wish we’d just drive a stake through its heart and put the poor abused word out of its misery.
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No one?
Be careful to whom you refer!
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As I said, compounding words for nouns and adjectives makes sense. My gripe is with people who do it to verbs, rendering the verb impossible to conjugate.
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My boss recently noted my continuing use of the traditional British spelling of words such as “mediaeval”, which nearly everyone has lapsed to “medieval”. We work in a very international company, with a lot of US staff, so I feel it’s my duty to stand up for the old ways.
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I confess: oftentimes when asked “How are you?”, I’ll reply “Good” instead of “Well” so as not to sound too pedantic. It’s become a bit of a habit now (using “good”). sigh.
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I saw this in (British) ad copy recently, and it really rubbed me the wrong way. Unfortunately I don’t remember the ad, or I would totally put them on blast
I noticed, and I have remarked on that in the language thread before, that native speakers actually have a harder time using it correctly than second language speakers coming from languages who have retained their case system. To me, as a German speaker, the difference between who and whom comes naturally. The same is true for correctly choosing the right archaic form of you (thou/thine, etc.) when trying to sound old-timey.
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