My what again?
When I stop and think of what grammar errors drive me the most insane, I think the misuse of words like your/you’re and their/there/they’re and its/it’s are at the top of my list, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I get snarky when I see these mistakes, such as
Your driving me nuts with your ineptitude!
or
Its time you learned how to writer properly!
and say things like, “My what again?”
These are the obvious ones, and I think it’s the apostrophe that usually throws people off, but as a grammarian, there are quite a few other blunders (and some things that I know are nothing more than pet peeves) that are sure to make my blood pressure shoot up, at least a bit. Here are a few:
- in the U.S., we use toward, not towards, just like it’s (see how I did that?) color, not colour
- punctuation outside the quotation marks, unless it’s (again!) an exception, of course
- IM speak or text speak or whatever it’s called these days (but lolspeak is acceptable in certain circumstances, including the Bible)
- not capitalizing the word I (I’m looking at you, McDonalds)
- the absence of the serial comma, because my parents, Angelina Jolie and God means something totally different than my parents, Angelina Jolie, and God
So what drives you insane?
Not all missing serial commas are grammatically inaccurate – journalists who follow AP style usually don’t include them (though it depends on the newspaper’s in-house style, I suppose). I only know this because I have to juggle two different style guides at work – AP style for anything that the public sees, and Chicago for anything that stays internal.
It’s the little differences in style between the two guides that drives me insane.
Yeah, I know. I think it goes back to how much ink can be saved, but still! Drives me insane!
Yeah, I’ve had to juggle AP, APA, and MLA at work, for some unknown reason. Plus in-house style. And we don’t use the serial comma.
We have an in-house guide too, but I wrote it, and I made everything easy for myself. I like Geneva style much, much more.
That’s pretty awesome! I’ve been able to set large portions of ours, but just the smaller stuff. I lost the change-to-the-serial-comma battle.
A lot should be one word –alot– but it ain’t yet.
I’m going to assume that’s tongue in cheek.
No — I think it should be one word, that it’s time for that to happen.
Oh. I’m going to have to think long and hard about that. Would you combine articles with other words, or just “lot”? As in, would you write, “abadger jumped over thefence”? I’m only sort of being facetious. Is this one of those instances where predominant usage becomes law? If that’s the case, I’m not sure that “alot” is actually predominant.
It would be interesting if we could give the population as a whole a grammar/spelling test every five or ten years just to track usage. Maybe we could send it out with the census.
We don’t really know what a “lot”
is, anymore. When we say a lot, we mean “many.” We mean alot.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. For instance, if you sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, you might say, “That’s a lot of food!” And I don’t think you mean “Those are many foods,” but rather that collectively, when added up, the total is very large. I guess maybe you could substitute “much” for “a lot” in many instances, but it still seems not quite right. “That is much food” is technically correct, but I think “a lot” is preferable. And I don’t see what you have to gain by cramming it into a single word. Would you then get rid of the need for some preposition to follow it? So that you wouldn’t be saying “That’s a lot of ducks,” nor “That’s alot of ducks,” but “That’s alot ducks,” just like “That’s many ducks” (or “Those are many ducks”)?
I can’t even follow that last sentence I wrote.
The only thing to gain would be a legal scrabble word, even though it wouldn’t be worth many points. But still.
What is a “lot?”
Nah, you can’t send it out with the census. That’s crazy government control and a violation of our privacy, remember?
Alot makes me nervous. But I must admit, I also don’t know what a “lot” is. But my eighth grade teacher always told us, “A lot is too much for one word!”
I was under the impression that both are generally acceptable these days. I’m sure it differs based on the usage guide you follow, but yeah.
I guess to take a more prescriptive stance, I still don’t see a reason to unify it, unless just to denote it as a colloquialism. I feel like knowing that we mean “many,” means we know what we mean by a lot, and generally in a more formal application, we’d likely already say “many.”
A very belated reply to this post, but I just came across this:
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
Good to see everyone thinking about the start of the editing season! A few weeks ago, this e-mail chain came through the CLMP listserve, about how to deal with angry submitters. And it’s interesting to note that the best defense in one instance was grammar–impersonal enough to act as emotional armor. Here’s a portion of correspondence from Fiction Circus:
http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=526&mode=one
Man, I can really boner my homophones in online comments and message board replies, so I tend to be pretty forgiving of them around the interwebz. In manuscripts and such though, let ‘em rip.
I think my biggest peeve is “definately/defiantly” instead of “definitely.” Oh gosh, I boil.
I must admit, every now and then I slip up with a misplaced apostrophe, and it’s horribly embarrassing. Other than that, my spelling is actually pretty horrible (but I think the you’re/your thing is understanding more than spelling). I blame auto spell check for all my problems.
I was actually rather paranoid of making a highly visible mistake in that post and being mocked. Heh.
A “lot” is more than a little. Just because it doesn’t have a precise meaning doesn’t mean it’s useless. “Bird,” for example, can refer to both a sparrow and a condor. They are drastically different animals but have that commonality between them, just as a half-dozen tribbles could be a lot to someone who’s never seen even a single tribble, but “a lot of tribbles” can mean ten thousand to someone who sees them all the time.
You can shoot down the bird analogy if you want on account of a bird having some technical definition (winged, certain bone structure, etc.), but “a lot” is a relative term anyway, so I’m not sure that rules it out. I also don’t think it’s a useless term; one of the great beauties (and troubles, sure) with English is the variety of words we have to choose from. I can say a lot, many, a bunch, several, numerous, etc. And, like any other word, a “lot” is contextualized by the words around it. So it can mean different things: I have a lot of doughnuts. I am in a lot of trouble because I ate all the doughnuts. I hate him a lot because he ate my doughnuts. Ten doughnuts is not a lot. Five doughnuts is too a lot! We ate a lot of doughnuts on the vacant lot. (Okay, I cheated.) Lot misses his salty wife; alas, it is his lot in life. (There, again.)
And according to one of my dictionaries (and probably the others), “lot” meaning “numerous” or “a great number” is about the fifteenth definition. The first several all refer to games of choice/chance or property. So would it be better to say let’s not change the spelling of the word now, but just use it in its intended way, and substitute “many” or “much” or whatever as appropriate?
Fun with words!
I simply think it’s morphed into one word. I don’t think we believe we’re wasting a “lot” of time here. I think we know we’re wasting alot of time. To me, it’s really one word.
Okay. I don’t consider it a waste of time, though. I enjoy sussing out things, getting to details to understand why things function the way they do (words, motorcycles, cats, etc.). I don’t get a chance to discuss the finer point of language evolution on a day-to-day basis.
I have found a visual representation of “alot.”
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
I just giggled for about three minutes because of that. Thanks.
Yes, I giggle.
I’m with you when it comes to heteronyms (you’re/your/too/to/two), but I’m not when it comes to slight variations of the same word (e.g. “towards/toward)” as there’s no difference in terms of meaning. (Merriam-Webster’s lists both variants.) I’m only a stickler for grammar/style when the difference adversely effects the meaning –when it doesn’t, I’m much more nonchalant about things. After all, it seems a bit strange to be persnickety about minor changes when they don’t add up to much, and when some of them (alot, for instance) seem to be becoming the status quo.
In fact, I think our culture’s butchering of lay/lie is actually doing some good. I’m all for a change there; those two words are too similar (and for no damn reason!), and they need a change.
Re: lay/lie, I’m totally on board with that.
Ha! Adversely effects the meaning! I’m hilarious!
Haha. I wasn’t going to mention it.
Eh, I’m at work, so I have to type quickly.
I forgive myself.
Same here. I mentioned above how horrible I tend to be with heteronyms online, especially on Monday mornings.
I recently figured out the principle parts of lay and lie, and for the sake of having something to snob/SNOOT over, I’d just assume keep them as is. But I suspect lay/lie will be amended soon. Me and Brett, or me and Christopher kills my soul, but I fear such phrasing may become par for the course soon, as well. I just leave toward/towards up to alliteration, or whatever function/device seems necessary for the sentence. Certain EWU staffers have tried to indoctrinate me with the exclusive use of ‘toward’ since it’s American, but whatever; I switch hit.
Sorry, can’t help myself to comment on this. As someone who is not a native speaker and was taught British English in school, I find it really amusing that people are arguing so strongly for not simplifying a phrase based on its most common usage when that is exactly why America stripped the ending of towards and doesn’t use the letter u in colour or neighbour. :-)
Does anybody know the historical reason for putting punctuation on the inside of quotations marks? This still looks wrong to me, even after 20+ years of living here. America is the only English-speaking country that does this. Was it invented when the tea bales where chucked overboard, just to add more spite?
Speaking of quotation marks and punctuation: I ran into the same problem when I studied German. Their quotation marks are crazy! In Swedish, y’all use two right quotes, which makes about as much sense as the quotes we use in the States (some?), but the Germans (as always) took weird and ran with it.
The French method is weird, too, and sometimes I have a hard time distinguishing between what’s dialogue and what isn’t, because there aren’t always closing quotation marks.
Yeah Germans do almost like what the Spanish do with their inverted question marks, but with quotation marks. The right quotes in doesn’t break my flow when I read Swedish. I guess the way they tilt isn’t something I usually pay attention to. In dialog though, sometimes >> or — is used instead of quotation marks and usually just at the beginning, which makes me pause for a while.
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