Am I disinterested or uninterested by errors?
Another one that I cannot stand is when people use “which” when “that” is actually correct.
“Which” is not more polite than “that.” It is used specifically when the relative clause is non-restrictive. If the relative clause is restrictive, then “which” is incorrect and should not be used.
Strangely enough I am somewhat OK with medieval, but the American spelling of archaeologist really annoys me.
As a medi(a)eval arch(a)eologist I have really drawn the short straw there.
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About Terry Pratchett using “??ould of”:
Well, thanks for making me check.
I grepped the whole Discworld series for “ould of”, and you are perfectly right, I was misremembering, no trace of the idiom outside reported or inner speech.
Maybe I was just struck by the construct, it was probably the first time I encountered it in writing.
Is punctuation part of grammar?
I’m medium-bad at it, but I’m seeing more and more the use of a hyphen where a comma (or even - gasp - a semicolon) could go - not that I should throw any stone, I do it a lot myself.
Is that some kind of trend or is it just me?
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I think it is too long-lasting to be a trend and not harmful to the meaning, however I would urge the use of the – en dash – or—the em dash— (this comes with a further, largely Transatlantic, disagreement on the use of spaces accompanying, or not, the dash).
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I’ll take it to heart and add them to my custom keyboard mapping – and shamelessly continue to use the construct.
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I agree with this one. I’ve been trying to remove it from my arsenal since I learned a few years ago that I’ve been using it incorrectly my whole life. Normally I would try to correct my usage, but in this case upon learning what it actually means, I thought, “Oh fuck, nobody understands it that way. I’ll be perpetually confusing people”.
Communication is a team sport. The speaker’s job is to ensure the listener understands them. Using language you know they are likely to misunderstand so you can take some kind of grammatical high ground and feel smug is just rude.
Edit: I’ll also put this out there: I am as much of a pedant for this stuff as anyone, but it’s worth remembering that the goal of communicating is exchanging ideas, not being correct. It can be worth using terms incorrectly if that is what your audience expects. If the other person understands what you meant, you have succeeded, full stop.
In other words, he had an editor. Being a writer has very little to do with having a flawless grasp of grammar and punctuation, and I’ve never seen a creative writer who does.
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Propper use of the n-dash or m-dash is one rule that I proudly refuse to learn.
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I consider that to be more of a style question.
E.g. “…use of a hyphen where a comma - or even (gasp) a semicolon - could go”
In principle, I agree about en dash (never that abomination the USian em dash with no spaces) but here on the BBS, for example, it’s just a hyphen. I like that MSWord always automatically extends a hyphen to an en dash when a hyphen is typed and you leave a space after the next word, but it’s the only text editing tool I’ve ever come across where that happens.
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It is only relatively recently that some UK presses abandoned the use of em dashes. I have several 1950s typography books and pamphlets that use unspaced em dashes.
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Terry was a time-served journalist (well, he spent a while employed in local newspapers and was also Press Officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board for a while) and very much in charge of his grammar.
Nevertheless, abominable. The lack of a space to denote that what is within the em dashes is separate from, or a diversion from, the main sentence is offensive to me. 
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Same here! I’ve been called out for using “well,” which does sound snooty or hoity toity to a lot of my relatives’ ears. I reply with “good” instead whenever I remember to do so.
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He was a great writer, but he still had editors. No writer doesn’t. Nobody can proofread their own work perfectly. There’s no shame in it. Writing books is a collaborative process between writer and editor and I’m sure he’d have been the first to tell you that. Every great writer speaks very highly of their editor (sometimes begrudgingly 
) for making them a better writer and making the final product better.
I do not disagree that editors perform a valuable task and a second pair of eyes is always needed to proof-read but your implication that Terry Pratchett was reliant on an editor to create grammatical writing was a step too far.
I never said anything of the sort. I appreciate you going full Weird Nerd and diving in front of some perceived bullet for him but I’m a big fan too and was not disrespecting him in any way.
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I have always believed that a good writer knows how to follow the rules, but a great writer knows when to break the rules.
Mastery of the language means bending it to your will, not the other way around.
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In direct response to me saying that …
…you clearly implied that he was reliant on an editor for that.
I am sure he used and admired editors and that they added to his work, but you directly suggested his ability to write correct grammar was due to them. I guess that was not your intention, but that’s how it read to me. I’m sure we are united in our admiration of him as a writer, though.
Why so much admiration of just him, though? Im sure content editors and copy editors have played big roles in how his books turn out.
It’s not exactly a grammatical issue, but a pet peeve of mine is hero worship of individual authors. Yes, they’re usually the main generative, work-producing force that results in books, but we readers rarely realize how much work by others also played a part.
For some reason, we simply must attach a book to one person (unless of course two or more are “coauthor”), the “author,” and our doing so obscures the contributing labor of others.
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Especially towards the end of his life, when he was struggling to get the last few books out into the world. The idea of a singular GREAT MAN doing everything perfectly all the time is, I think, something that Pratchett would have scoffed at anyhow. He was a great writer and a storyteller, but writing a book length project is difficult work and will ALWAYS need help from others. Our continued embrace of GREAT MAN theories of the world is really blinkering us to understand how the world actually functions…
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