• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Calling All Grammar Nazi's

I also see many people use the subjunctive incorrectly. For instance, I see it written, "If I was in L.A." where the correct form is, "If I were in L.A."
 
Just spotted in the New Yorker (Shock! Horror! Some sub should be sacked etc etc)

Insure and Ensure

You ensure you insure your car each year.

You don't insure you insure it.

Ensure is to make certain.

Insure is to make a contigency for a possible future event.

Insuring your car's insured would mean something like buying an insurance policy against the possibility that you will fail to buy an insurance policy :confused:


Not strictly grammar per se, but this thread appears to have already extended it's remit ;)


PS: don't tell me I'm wrong: I don't want to know :D
 
MoodyBlues said:
Here's a good one...and it's right here on AF! :eek: Take a look at the description on this page under "Private Chat With Moderators:"



:D
Click to expand...

I think that you're seeing things. :p

Srsly, thanks for pointing that out. Now my subscription here has really paid off. :)

For more grammar errors, choose one of my posts at random. I don't mean to do it. I know better. But who has time to pruferead?
 
EarlyMon said:
I think that you're seeing things. :p

Srsly, thanks for pointing that out. Now my subscription here has really paid off. :)

For more grammar errors, choose one of my posts at random. I don't mean to do it. I know better. But who has time to purrread?
Click to expand...

fify;)
 
I already love this thread.

I'm an unregenerate grammar/spelling/punctuation nazi and an advocate of the Society for Prevention of Apostrophe Abuse. I actually hate the use of "nazi" here, but it's the accepted meme (or is it a trope?), so I'll go with it.

I type too fast, which results in lots of typos. I promise, most of them aren't spelling mistakes. They're sloppy fingers ("Home keys! Put your fingers on the home keys!" the ghost of my high school typing teacher screams in my ear). But feel free to call me on them anyway. In fact, I was rather famous for them in a roleplaying guild I used to be in.

Feel free, also, to lambast me (kindly) for my run-on sentences and sentence fragments. I'm incurably guilty of both.

Pet peeves? Hmm. Oh, so many.
Apostrophe abuse
The wall of text with a single period at the end, if you're lucky
The poor tortured homonym and homophone
Using the wrong word, or the Panda (you made me laugh, and I think the Panda example now deserves its own name, rather like the Picard Maneuver).
Netspeak and leetspeak
Superfluous quotation marks (and while we're on the subject, using "quote" for "quotation")
Randomly turning nouns into verbs, e.g. access, gift, and reference

One of my nephews, who went to a well revered private school, once told me that they actually don't teach spelling at all in his school. It was already obvious that hardly any schools teach grammar, punctuation or vocabulary. What in the hell do they teach in English class, then?

Wanna know what REALLY scares me? When I've been reading Internet forums for a long time, I find myself typing "to" instead of "too" or "you're" instead of "your" before I can catch myself. God help us if it turns out to be catching!
 
SueDNim said:
I already love this thread.
Click to expand...
:)

I actually hate the use of "nazi" here, but it's the accepted meme (or is it a trope?), so I'll go with it.
Click to expand...

Same here. The reason I chose the word was to reassure people who care about grammar/language that they aren't nazis, and to provide a space to talk about it in which it was appropriate.

Using the wrong word, or the Panda (you made me laugh, and I think the Panda example now deserves its own name, rather like the Picard Maneuver).
Click to expand...

Tanks. :)

Superfluous quotation marks
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean by this; could you give us some examples?


Randomly turning nouns into verbs, e.g. access, gift, and reference
Click to expand...

I had to look up "access" in my OED because it seems to me so natural to use. Its earliest recorded use in that dictionary is 1962, coined by... computer geeks. So its all right with me. Verbs, especially jargon, develop out of a necessity for a word to describe a process. That it eventually moved into general use (earliest recorded general use in the OED is by University of California at Berkeley in 1978) seems testament to its usefulness as a word.

To "gift"... well, yes, that is quite horrible.

I think my point is that this verbification of nouns should be considered on an individual basis, as that is how words were created in the first place.

Wanna know what REALLY scares me? When I've been reading Internet forums for a long time, I find myself typing "to" instead of "too" or "you're" instead of "your" before I can catch myself. God help us if it turns out to be catching!
Click to expand...

Well for me it's that it almost feels normal to want to write "gotten" instead of "got" lol :)
 
If you insist on posting from a device like a phone or tablet, make sure you put the correct word into the user dictionary. Also make sure you check the word in the choice area before you tap on it.

Use antecedents so we can figure out who or what in hell you are talking about if more than one person or item is in the post.
 
Well, it looks like "random" is replacing a lot of words and phrases these days.

It isn't a huge deal, as I recall our use of words that seemed handy to us as 13 year-olds. We identified with those terms as "ours," because "they," the adults, used them for the most part as defined in the dictionary, while we used them as defined by several things, such as a sort of peripheral take on what the word could mean.

Peers picked the words up and ran with them, validating our generational feeling of power. ;)

Often, the new definition of our chosen word was not new at all; as it was just second, third or fourth on the list of definitions in the dictionary.

"Random" doesn't mean "accidental," as it is often used by many in their teens, 20s and even 30s, but it's their way of using that word (among other ways), so I understand, as we had "boss" and "wicked" and "bitchin" and "far out" and "groovy" which all meant "impressive" when you got right down to how those words were used. :D

Wow! Steve got a wicked set of baby moons for his short ("short" meant "car"). It's so boss. ... etc.
 
davoid said:
Same here. The reason I chose the word was to reassure people who care about grammar/language that they aren't nazis, and to provide a space to talk about it in which it was appropriate.
Click to expand...

Oh, I got you. I was being oversensitive to the word itself. Maybe if I type it all lower case, it won't look so bad. ;)

I'm not sure what you mean by this; could you give us some examples?
Click to expand...
I see it mostly on signs, but it sometimes creeps into fora as well (see what I did there? :rolleyes: ) I refer to putting quotation marks where the poor things have no business being put.

Here's my understanding of the proper use of quotation marks:
1. An actual quotation or character dialog
2. The title of a literary or other artistic work (This one confuses me a bit, because I'm never sure which sort of title does and doesn't take quotation marks. For instance, do you use quotation marks with a short story or article, but not the encapsulating book or magazine? What about a movie versus a book title?)
3. An alias such as "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (why did that one pop into my head?)
4. Reference to a word itself rather than the meaning of the word
5. Ironic or euphemistic use of a word

It's the last one that seems to cause the mass confusion. I suppose people think they need to use quotation marks for emphasis, which is incorrect usage. It gets ridiculous when they use them on a word which didn't need to be emphasized in the first place.

There are some very funny blogs and compilations of misused quotation marks, but I don't think I'm allowed to post links yet.

Here are a couple of examples:
Seen on a sign at the butcher's counter: Ring bell for "meat service"
(How disgusting does that sound?)
Seen on a billboard: Thank "God" for for all the troops
(If you put "God" in quotation marks, maybe the atheists won't get offended)

I had to look up "access" in my OED because it seems to me so natural to use. Its earliest recorded use in that dictionary is 1962, coined by... computer geeks. So its all right with me. Verbs, especially jargon, develop out of a necessity for a word to describe a process. That it eventually moved into general use (earliest recorded general use in the OED is by University of California at Berkeley in 1978) seems testament to its usefulness as a word.

To "gift"... well, yes, that is quite horrible.

I think my point is that this verbification of nouns should be considered on an individual basis, as that is how words were created in the first place.
Click to expand...
I sit corrected.

Well for me it's that it almost feels normal to want to write "gotten" instead of "got" lol :)
Click to expand...
I used to do that, too, and I'm trying to train myself out of it. I've succeeded to the degree that I'm uncomfortably aware when I've written "gotten" and I correct myself. Then I have to feel that creepy sensation of writing something that just sounds wrong in my head.
 
SueDNim said:
I sit corrected.
Click to expand...

Hey, I wasn't "correcting" you (was that a proper usage or did that just get your goat? ;)). I think there are some horrible examples of verbification, but the process itself is normal.

Quoted from this website:

Psychologist Steven Pinker estimates that up to a fifth of English verbs are derived from nouns--including such ancient verbs as rain, snow, and thunder along with more recent converts like oil, pressure, referee, bottle, debut, audition, highlight, diagnose, critique, email, and mastermind.
Click to expand...

I think it is because it has been happening a lot recently and sometimes for no good reason ("gift"), that the practice is beginning to appear vulgar and consequently wrong. (I almost wrapped quotes around "wrong" there.)

I used to do that, too, and I'm trying to train myself out of it. I've succeeded to the degree that I'm uncomfortably aware when I've written "gotten" and I correct myself. Then I have to feel that creepy sensation of writing something that just sounds wrong in my head.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing from your carrier AT&T that you are American. In that case "gotten" is ok - it is right, even. For myself in the UK, if I use "gotten" I feel like I'm betraying something. On the other hand, if you use "got", then you will feel the same.

If you use "got" it will seem that you are affecting Englishness, whereas if I use "gotten" I will be forgoing my Englishness in favour of affecting a literary affinity with modern American literature - which I do like btw.

So I say stick with what feels right. :)
 
davoid said:
If you use "got" it will seem that you are affecting Englishness, whereas if I use "gotten" I will be forgoing my Englishness in favour of affecting a literary affinity with modern American literature - which I do like btw.

So I say stick with what feels right. :)
Click to expand...


That's it exactly. I have a choice between sounding, in my own ears, like a boorish country bumpkin or an affected snob. Hah! Oh, well. I don't care that much. I can't run around being hypersensitive to the slightest grammatical misstep. I make too many of them myself!

I do use quite a few "Englishnesses" (how's that for a non-word?) just because I like them better.

Here's something I'm guilty of. Of which I'm guilty. I didn't even know what to call it until I stumbled across it today.

"Sometimes the relative pronoun anaphor may not appear, but may be implied by syntactic principles; this is called a zero anaphor
I know the book you want. (=I know the book that you want.)"

I do think that a lot can be forgiven in the name of personal style, at least when one is not writing formally. However, I also believe that in order to earn the right to use your own slangy personal style you must first demonstrably learn to use language correctly. That distinction is where my grammar nazi comes in.
 
I thought this was worth stealing from the funny pictures thread.

firstgrammarnazi_zps67ecf302.jpg
 
Well, I love using "superfluous" quotation marks, as well as (unnecessary) parentheses.:rolleyes:
 
D'you know, whenever I see a new entry in this thread my first thought is "Oh no - what screw up did I make in my last post?"
 
Gmash said:
Well, I love using "superfluous" quotation marks, as well as (unnecessary) parentheses.:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I think that is a good example of when to use "superfluous" quotes - when you are questioning the validity of the quoted phrase.

Actually I think your parenthases were unnecessary in this case ;)
(Actually, now I'm not sure.)

SiempreTuna said:
D'you know, whenever I see a new entry in this thread my first thought is "Oh no - what screw up did I make in my last post?"
Click to expand...

Lol
 
Apparently, there's now a competition for the worst examples of bad grammar. They read some of the entries on the short list on the radio this morning and I have to say, I kinda struggled to spot the problem with some of 'em.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom