Please state in which country your phrase tends to be used, what the phrase is, and what it should be.
Example:
In America, recently came across “back-petal”, instead of back-pedal. Also, still hearing “for all intensive purposes” instead of “for all intents and purposes”.
Capitalizing black mid-setence. It’s an absolutely ridiculous convention, and something only the American Left could take seriously.
Sincerely, Everyone else
People using ‘yourself’ and ‘myself’ instead of ‘you’ and ‘me’ when trying to sound formal or posh. You don’t sound formal or posh, you sound ill-educated.
In German:
- “Je X, je Y.”
statt eines davon
- “Je X, desto Y.”
- “Je X, umso Y.”
Aisle. As much as I would love to take a boat to the breakfast food isle (a.k.a. island), I’m pretty sure that I need to look in the breakfast aisle at the grocery store.
“If” with nothing before it after it. If you’ll call me back… That means nothing! If you call me then we can talk. I would appreciate it if you would call me back.
Pretty sure it’s “Feral Intensive Porpoises”
Former colleague used to say "for all intensive purposes"every few sentences.
“Its”
As “its” is used to indicate possession by “it”, “its” is an exception to apostrophe-s construction as used to indicate possessive forms.
“It’s”, used as either the contractive form or the possessive form, does not require such an exception. The distinction between the contractive and possessive forms of “it’s” rarely/never introduces ambiguity; the distinction is clear from context.
The word “its” should be deprecated.
Or people could just get it right. It’s really not that hard.
Found the English teacher.
Ha 😁
I have a much better plan: deprecate the stupid apostrophe for all possessives! It always looks semi-illiterate to me, like the 15th-century Dutch printsetters weren’t hot on English grammar (not sure, but I bet this is in fact how it happened - German possessives manage fine without the apostrophe).
In other news, the possessive apostrophe is now allowed as part of a name (Rita’s Restaurant) in German…
Yes I heard about that! The illogical abomination that is English spelling and grammar is going to destroy the world’s languages one by one!
As “its” is used to indicate possession by “it”, “its” is an exception to apostrophe-s construction as used to indicate possessive forms.
Most, if not all, pronouns work that way though.
“The man’s arm” becomes “his arm” not “him’s arm”. “The woman’s arm” becomes “her arm” not “her’s arm”. Similarly, “the robot’s arm” becomes “its arm” not “it’s arm”.
I don’t really care if people use “it’s” instead of “its” , but I don’t think it’s a unique exception. The only thing that’s unique is that it is pronounced the same way as if you tacked an apostrophe and an s on the end. If we used the word “hims” instead of “his”, I’m sure people would start putting an apostrophe in there too.
“The man’s arm” becomes “his arm” not “him’s arm”.
Similarly, “the robot’s arm” becomes “its arm” not “it’s arm”
But, “the man” you referred to does not become “hi”. “The robot” you mentioned does become “it”.
Right, and for pronouns you don’t just put apostrophe s after. So you don’t make “it” possessive by adding apostrophe s just like you don’t add apostrophe s to “he” or “him” to make it possessive.
If you treat the pronoun “it” like a regular (non-pronoun) noun instead of like other pronouns, that is itself an exception.
If “it” is actually the subject then it would not be a contradiction.
But when “it” is a pronoun for something else (which is definitely at least 99.9% of the time.
As a non native speaker, it really irks me when people mix up “brake” and “breake”, specially among car enthusiasts.
Every time I try to slow down my car, I hear chopped up and recontextualized Amens…
People saying “exscape”, “expresso”, “pasghetti”
I’m not entirely against it, but I’m amused by how common it is to put “whole” inside of “another”, making it “a whole nother”. Can anyone give any other use of the word “nother”?
This entire thread is /c/badlinguistics
I really wish there were enough lemmings to maintain ling or grammar communities here. It’s one thing I really miss from reddit
I agree, and I love your username.
“Seen”.
Holy fuck, “seen”.I honestly think that using this word incorrectly has gotten worse over the last few years. Hearing someone say, “yeah, I seen her yesterday” just makes me want to punch the wall.
“Could of…”
It’s “could have”!
Edit: I’m referring to text based things, like text and email. I can pretty much ignore the mispronouncing.
Also they’re/their, your/you’re, here/hear, to/too.
That’s a dialectal difference, not an error.
Not when written
It’s very much not recommended, and generally seen as an error. But this article puts an asterisk on it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/whats-worse-than-coulda
I am viscerally against this concept.
It’s one thing to include the spelling as a way to capture the phonetics of an accent or a dialect, entirely another to accept its use in writing when using a neutral voice.
If anything, because it’s so often just a misspelling I would avoid trying to use it as a phonetics thing just as a matter of style. At this point everybody would think I’m making a mistake instead of trying to mimic a way of speech in a way they’d never do with “coulda”.
With you on all counts.
I mean no? The have in could have is pronounced the same as of, but at least AFAIK no dialect explicitly says could of. Tell the other person to not mesh the two words together and they’ll say have. I think.
Minor nit pick from my experience. If the word is written out “could have” I enunciate the entire word. I only pronounce the contraction “could’ve” as “could of”. And vice versa when dictating.
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This one never gets me anywhere, but “begging the question” is actually a logical fallacy where you assume the result and use that as the basis of your argument. Otherwise, it raises the question.
How do you feel about other words or phrases that have different meanings in specific fields vs common use? Like a scientific theory is very different from your buddy’s theory about what the movie you watched meant. Since beg is a stronger word than raise, some statements scream out for questions in response, while others merely give rise to some further need for clarification.
The same goes for the exception that proves the rule. People use it as a magic spell that does away with unwanted evidence but it’s self explanatory. No parking on Fridays means you can park every other day.
That’s actually a post-hoc rationalization; in the original phrase, “proves” has a meaning closer to “tests”. But, yes, people use this one all the time to justify being wrong either way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
Probably not according to Wikipedia.
and how is that post-hoc?
If I claimed I didn’t get a ticket that day because I wore my lucky socks that would be post-hoc. I don’t see how that applies here.
There’s an exception to every rule (except that one)
Idiocracy is literally a documentary anymore
