I understand it’s controversial, but people who don’t put the final comma in a list before “and” which then groups the final two items as one erroneously.
Also, when people put a space before a comma. I’m not sure why they do that, but it’s cemented in some people’s brains who speak fluent English from childhood onward.
I see where you’re coming from. In school we were also taught to NOT put a comma before ‘and’ if it’s a list. I also didn’t quite get it, and found it weird. However, if you consider ‘and’ and a comma serving the same purpose (linking the elements in a list), then putting a comma before ‘and’ would just make either of them redundant. I’m not saying I prefer either of the two, but at least there is a reason to it.
The issue comes in when you consider there are times you’d want to group things. Example:
I would like a toolbox with 4 drawers: Nuts and bolts, screws, washers and chisels.
Oh, if anything, unless it’s in the last element, it’s easier to see paired items in the list ( ‘,’ -> next element; ’ and ’ -> still the same element, with ‘and’ inside). When it’s the last element, it’s indeed ambiguous. And then there’s /u/hakase 's comment:
“They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook”, where Betty is the maid mentioned.
The Oxford comma! I am also a fan.
I sign this as well. It’s literally a character difference and there is no ambiguity at all. There is no downside.
The downside is that with appositive phrases present the Oxford comma can introduce ambiguity:
“Thanks to my mother, Mother Teresa, and the pope.”
In the Oxford comma system this is ambiguous between three people (1. my mother 2. Mother Teresa 3. the pope), and two people (1. my mother, who is Mother Teresa 2. the pope). Without the Oxford comma it’s immediately clear that “, Mother Teresa,” is an appositive phrase.
The opposite happens as well, where Oxford commas allow true appositives to be unintentionally read as lists:
“They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook”, where Betty is the maid mentioned.
This ambiguity is easily fixed, of course, but then again so is any ambiguity from not using an Oxford comma as well.
Note that I use the Oxford comma myself, but it’s still worth mentioning that both systems are ambiguous, just in different ways.
Interesting. I never thought of that before. Thanks!
When people formulate questions as statements, because it throws me out of my reading flow ha ing to correct my inner voice.
Resistance to shifting grammar annoys me.
Educated linguists know really well that language changes over time. It is natural and expected. There are also living valid variations of grammar outside standardized “book” grammar.
People who are zero educated just go with whatever.
People who are half educated juuuust enough to be smartasses but not enough to be smart will say shit like “I don’t know, can you?” in response to “Can I go to the bathroom”. Or pretend an emphasized negation - aka double negative - can be interpreted as a positive.
Regarding double negatives, I get what you are saying, but they absolutely can be interpreted as a positive - this is easily proven by simply reversing one of them, and they can be reversed because they are after all negatives.
But if the speaker’s meaning is clear then of course it’s rude and incorrect to misinterpret them.
I feel like there’s a gray area though where some constructions may be genuinely ambiguous which way the speaker meant (since a double negative as negative by definition means the opposite of what the words would mean otherwise)
You do something ON purpose or BY accident, you don’t do anything ON accident!
“On the weekend”. I think that fits too.
Eh, you can have things you need to do on the weekend, but you can also have things you need to do by the weekend.
Some of mine in no particular order:
- Comma splices.
- Using apostrophes to make abbreviations plural. It’s UFOs, not UFO’s. This goes for decades, too. It’s 1920s, not 1920’s.
- Putting punctuation in the wrong place when parentheticals are involved (like this.) (Or like this).
- Same for quotations. Programmers in particular seem averse to putting punctuation on the inside where it usually belongs.
- Mixing up insure, ensure, and assure.
- Using ‘that’ where ‘who’ is more appropriate. For example, “People that don’t use their blinkers are annoying.”
People who use “can” to mean either “can” OR “can’t” and expect you to work out what they mean from context.
I absolutely detest the practice of saying the “the proper nouns of the world,” i.e the Tom Brady’s of the world. Or the Empire State buildings of the world. First off, it’s a proper noun. The implication of a proper noun is there is only one specific instance. Second, that’s diminishing to the proper noun used by lowering that status to the mean. Last, it’s usually used in a sports context to unnecessarily group up a bunch of players even though we already know the context of why they’re being grouped up for comparison. It’s just fucking dumb. It really grinds my gears.
Oh, great, now I’m going to notice this one too. Thanks for causing me more consternation.
“What” and “which” being used interchangeably.
Oh that’s a good one. I can feel my blood pressure rising.
“Then” when it should be “than”.
People starting sentences with “I mean”, and no prior context.
A wall of text with no punctuation.
It’s getting (or has been for some time) terrible on Reddit. Kids just narrating into their phones without taking a breath and clicking post without reading back over that text wall. I find this primarily in the paranormal subs that I read when I can’t fall asleep at night.
Mine is petty, but is due to having an internal voice when I read. When commonly used words are misspelled, like using loose instead of lose, I ‘hear’ it pronounced as spelled and it drives me nuts. Homophones like their and there don’t annoy me nearly as much.
I also mispronounce words learned from reading that don’t follow normal phonetic patterns that I’m used to, like melee, so I do understand why people mix up loose and lose. It is still painful to read.
Abberant apostrophes (and missing ones).
Sentences that miss out words for no reason: e.g. “A couple things” vs. “A couple of things”.
Confusing envy and jealousy.
The above is a personal list; I don’t get judgemental about others’ grammar but I do cringe internally.
The apostrophe thing really grinds my gears. Especially “it’s” vs “its”. It’s not very hard, “it’s” is a contraction meaning “it is”. Otherwise, it’s possessive. This homonym is its own worst enemy.
I hate that “jealousy” has devoured “envy”. “Language is fluid”, they always say, but those two words have very different meanings!
I hate that “jealousy” has devoured “envy”. “Language is fluid”, they always say, but those two words have very different meanings!
You’ll have to hate the Greeks for that then, because the usage of Ancient Greek ζῆλος (zêlos, from which we get both of the doublets “jealous” and “zealous”) already overlapped with what we now call “envy”, and this overlap was borrowed into Latin as zelosus (which still overlapped with the native Latin word invidiosus that became envy), and thence into Old French jalous, which continued to overlap with envie.
That is to say, as far back as we can trace, jealous has always also meant envious, and they’ve coexisted in that manner since at least Classical Latin.
As with most of the obnoxiously pedantic “facts” about language in threads like this one, this supposed “distinction” is recent, artificial, and only exists to give those in the know a false sense of superiority over those without the “secret knowledge”. The secret knowledge is usually (as it is in this case) literally wrong, but all that matters to them, of course, is that they have a reason to think of themselves as better than other people.
That’s a bit harsh. When I say someone is envious as opposed to jealous, I am trying to convey a particular meaning. It doesn’t bother me if someone uses the terms interchangeably as I can usually work out what they mean, but I do like my communication to be as clear as possible.
Ah, there you are.
Here I am, calling out pedants for being literally and demonstrably wrong about language for two years and counting!
“I see your pedantry, and raise you triple-dog pedantry!”
The difference being that my “pedantry” is informed by history and linguistic theory, and is intended to stop linguistic prejudice, as opposed to the pedantry threads like this are magnets for, perpetuating linguistic prejudice while being completely wrong in the process.
You have an unnecessary comma in there.
See my comment here about why there is no such thing as confusing envy and jealousy, because “jealousy” has always included the meaning of envy for at least the past 2500 years.
Are you jealous people who aren;t bothered by those errors?
Well done on that semi-colon: really pushing my buttons!
i have than more we can always never listen to
I actually came across one of mine in this thread where someone was talking about an unrelated one of theirs: The plural of a word that ends with “st” is “sts”, not also “st”. If you write it like that because that’s how you say it, it’s because you’re also saying it wrong.
Pronouncing familiar as fermiliar.
