BellaOnline Forums Career Nonfiction Writing Grammatical Pet Peeves?

This week's article is on semicolons. Semicolons are rumored to be going out of style because so few people use them. We need to declare them an endangered punctuation!

What is your favorite grammatical or spelling pet peeve? My personal one is confusing lose and loose.

Lose: I can't find my keys. I always lose them!
Loose: My ring is loose. If I'm not careful, I'll lose it.

I have a few pet peeves when it comes to grammatical errors, too. I am with you on semi-colons also. We should call them the "endangered punctuation" like you said! Things I hate to see are: their-they're, your-you're, where-wear, and people that misuse words like: he don't, she don't, I axed.

I read that Cambridge, one of the pocket size dictionary people, said they may just start adding words that people use, showing them to be correct, too. No way!! They've got to be kidding!

Trish

One thing I dislike is when collective nouns are interpreted as plural nouns (instead of singular nouns).

I know that collective nouns can be counted as either singular or plural in most cases, but it still pains me to see/hear sentences like "My family are feuding" and "The group haven't arrived yet."

In my book, it's either "The committee has voted" or "The members of the committee have voted" -- never "The committee have voted." That just sounds so wrong to me...

The its / it's thing always stands out to me - it seems like even newspaper reporters get it wrong sometimes.

It's is only a contraction for "it is" - nothing else

The NY Times just wrote about semicolons!

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This is more of a change in popular vocabulary, but I don't like it when nouns are turned into verbs. For instance, "She Googled her new boyfriend's name" drives me up the wall. I USE Google. Google is a thing, not an action!

It especially drives me up the wall when a verb form of the noun already exists but people don't use it. This seems to be common on reality shows. On Clean House they always say something like, "I will gift you a new sofa if you throw away your magazine collection." Why would you say "gift" if the word "give" is already out there?

My personal peeve is the use of apostrophes in place of a plural, such as "tree's" instead of "trees." And the constant use of "I" where it clearly should be "me." My boss is famous for this: "He'll meet with John and I after lunch." Even worse, when I is used as a possessive! "Michael and I's house..." UGH!

Side note on the collective noun issue, that strikes me as more common in British usage. Have you encountered it that way here, too?

What always gets me is when people don't add the "ed" on the end of a word that should have it.

I can't stand to see "toss" salad (tossED salad).

I actually saw a brand name advertise its "ice" tea the other day instead of ICED tea. Drives me insane!

I think it may have happened when teachers here (UK) went overboard on the teaching of the apostrophe - kids 'overdelivered' to be on the safe side, sticking huge tadpole shapes on the end of every word and the habit stuck with them. (I know, because I'm a teacher and - My! - have I seen some artistic apostrophes. (LOL, note - no apostrophe there!)

A LOT. It's two words people! "Alot" isn't a real word, yet I see it everywhere. >_<