There's no place for me, everywhere that I go only seems to bring upset and harm!
Osu!
I'm kind of remaking a post from my deviantART journal I made years ago here, letting my inner Grammar Nazi out (although when is it not out?) to dedicate a journal post to some common grammar mistakes. Hopefully you'll find it educational and informative (as opposed to the more likely reactions of "pretentious" and "nerdy"). So let's get started!
First, one that trips up even the most literate of English speakers - affect vs. effect. The two words are pronounced almost identically (unless you stress the pronunciation, of course), so they naturally get confused. To sum it up: Affect is a verb, and effect is a noun. There ARE, however, obscure meanings of "affect" as a noun (one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is a "blunt affect", for instance) and "effect" as a verb (meaning "to bring about", e.g. "The smoking ban effected a change in the nature of pubs across the country), but these are very rarely used (and "affect" as a noun is stressed on the first syllable, rather than the second). There are a few ways to help remember this:
1. RAVEN = Remember, A: Verb, E: Noun.
2. "The effect" - the Es go together.
It's vs. its. It's is a contraction of "it is", while its is the possessive form of it (i.e. belonging to it).
Their, there and they're. "There" is a locator, meaning "in that place". "Their" is a possessive pronoun, meaning "belonging to them". "They're" is a contraction of "they are".
Your (possessive pronoun meaning "belonging to you") vs. you're (contraction of "you are").
The old-fashioned exclamation meaning "I agree" is "Hear, hear!" as in "Hear (listen to) what this person is saying", not "Here, here!" as in "In this location, in this location!"
To be jealous means that you are afraid that something you own will get taken away by someone else. It's often incorrectly used to mean envious, which is when you want something that someone else has (either material or immaterial).
"Toot sweet" is a common eggcorn (i.e. a nonsense phrase phonetically similar to an actual word or phrase) for "tout de suite", an English expression borrowed from the French meaning "immediately" or "straight away".
Another one is "for all intensive purposes". The correct phrase is "for all intents and purposes". It means "for any possible reason", not "for any intense reason".
It's "pay-per-view", not "paper view". Seriously, I have actually heard people call it "paper view". I have no idea why. "Per" means "for each", i.e. you pay for each view(ing) of the program in question.
"Computer" is not synonymous with "CPU". The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is one of the internal PARTS of the computer as a whole. (That doesn't really have anything to do with grammar, admittedly, but I still think people should be made clear on this.)
There is a saying "One bad apple spoils the bunch, but one good apple can't restore the bad ones". It's often corrupted and shortened into "One bad apple doesn't spoil the bunch", which is completely wrong (both literally and metaphorically).
Similarly, "The proof is in the pudding" is a corruption of the real phrase "The proof of the pudding is in the eating", with "proof" in this context meaning "test".
More an instance of terminology, but still a pet peeve of mine: Octopuses (and I'll talk about that plural in the next entry) do not have tentacles, they have (cephalopod) arms. What's the difference? Tentacles only have suckers on the ends, whereas arms have suckers all down their length.
And yes, octopuses. "Octopi" is an incorrect plural. It's a Greek-derived word (anglicised: Oktopous, meaning "eight foot"), not a Latin-derived one. If it was Latin, it would be "octoped" and the plural would be "octopedes". Technically, "Octopodes" (pronounced "ock-to-POH-dess") is the correct plural, but that's usually considered overly pedantic. "Octopuses" is the commonly accepted plural nowadays. (Some dictionaries do still list "octopi" as an alternative plural, though most point out that it's considered incorrect).
I've seen this mistake come up a lot in the chat too, so I'll just point it out here: The appropriate term is "transgender". Not "transgendered". It's a continuous state of being, not something that happened in the past and has now ended.
"Literally" is a word I will fight for until the day I die. It means "word for word, not figuratively, not as an idiom or metaphor". If you say you could literally eat a horse, I will put a horse in front of you and watch you eat it. Unfortunately, some dictionaries add a second definition of "in effect, virtually", which is the exact opposite of what it really means (and is the way most people incorrectly use it), making it even harder to keep the word from losing its meaning.
"Pedophilia" specifically means sexual attraction to PRE-PUBESCENT children. If you find yourself attracted to an underage teenage character in a TV show/movie/anime/whatever, you are not committing pedophilia, but ephebophilia. (And it doesn't mean "having sex with children" either, it just means a sexual attraction to them. Not all pedophiles are sex offenders.)
An example that no longer applies to modern usage of the word: The word "virgin" originally referred specifically to a GIRL that has never had sex. French and German have their own words for a male virgin (Puceau in French and Jungling in German), but English doesn't.
Of course, Grammar Nazis themselves make some mistakes from time to time. Often, low-level ones will insist on always using "and I" instead of "and me", when in fact the correct phrase varies depending on whether the speaker is the subject or the object of the verb. For example, "John, Steve, Paul and I went to the zoo". The speaker is the subject of the sentence in this case (i.e. the one doing the verb), so "and I" is used. "Steve sent an email to John, Paul and me" uses "and me" because in this case the speaker is the object (i.e. the thing to whom the verb is being done). The easiest way to tell which one to use is to strip off everything except the first person pronoun and see if it still makes sense grammatically. "Me went to the zoo" and "Steve sent an email to I" both don't sound right at all.
"Amateur" just means someone who does something for fun and as a hobby, as opposed to "professional" which means someone who does something as a job and to make money. "Amateur" does not itself mean "bad", even though it's often used that way.
It's "different from" something, not "different to" or "different than". It comes from the Latin differens, meaning "to bring away". You can bring something away FROM something else, but you can't bring something away to something else (well, you can, but that would involve getting it closer, which is the opposite of what the word means), and you can't bring something away than something else either.
Technically, a "spiral staircase" is not a spiral at all but a helix. A spiral is something that extends outwards from a point (or moves inwards towards a point, depending on which way round you look at it).
Also technically, "nauseous" is an adjective, and describes something that MAKES YOU feel sick. The actual feeling itself is "nauseated". Of course, nowadays people use "nauseous" to mean "nauseated" and "nauseating" to mean "nauseous".
If you spot a large bag left alone in an airport, and you think it looks suspicious, then you're wrong. YOU are suspicious of the bag, the bag itself is "suspect".
An example from Spider-Man 2:
Peter Parker: (In response to J. Jonah Jameson wanting to print lies about Spider-Man in the Daily Bugle) You can't print that. That's slander!
JJJ: It is not! I resent that. (softer) Slander is spoken. In print, it's "libel".
"Inferred" and "implied" often get mixed up too. Inferred is on the part of the listener, while implied is on the part of the speaker. Or as the famous saying goes, "You infer, I imply".
"Less" is used with uncountable nouns, such as "air" and "water", etc. For countable nouns, such as "oranges" and "houses", the proper word is "fewer". "Five items or less" in supermarket checkouts is wrong, it should be "five items or fewer".
The grocer's apostrophe is a common grammatical mistake - using apostrophes to make a plural, as grocers were wont to do (and still are, as a matter of fact) - for example, putting a sign above the apples for sale reading "Apple's".
It's "anchors aweigh", not "away". "Aweigh" means "Just drawn out of the ground, and hanging perpendicularly" - in other words, the anchor is raised and the ship is ready to sail.
And for that matter, in naval parlance, a ship is defined as any vessel that moves on the surface of the water, while a boat is any vessel that goes beneath the surface. (Small rowing boats and dinghies are still called boats, though, confusingly enough).
I'm kind of remaking a post from my deviantART journal I made years ago here, letting my inner Grammar Nazi out (although when is it not out?) to dedicate a journal post to some common grammar mistakes. Hopefully you'll find it educational and informative (as opposed to the more likely reactions of "pretentious" and "nerdy"). So let's get started!
First, one that trips up even the most literate of English speakers - affect vs. effect. The two words are pronounced almost identically (unless you stress the pronunciation, of course), so they naturally get confused. To sum it up: Affect is a verb, and effect is a noun. There ARE, however, obscure meanings of "affect" as a noun (one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is a "blunt affect", for instance) and "effect" as a verb (meaning "to bring about", e.g. "The smoking ban effected a change in the nature of pubs across the country), but these are very rarely used (and "affect" as a noun is stressed on the first syllable, rather than the second). There are a few ways to help remember this:
1. RAVEN = Remember, A: Verb, E: Noun.
2. "The effect" - the Es go together.
It's vs. its. It's is a contraction of "it is", while its is the possessive form of it (i.e. belonging to it).
Their, there and they're. "There" is a locator, meaning "in that place". "Their" is a possessive pronoun, meaning "belonging to them". "They're" is a contraction of "they are".
Your (possessive pronoun meaning "belonging to you") vs. you're (contraction of "you are").
The old-fashioned exclamation meaning "I agree" is "Hear, hear!" as in "Hear (listen to) what this person is saying", not "Here, here!" as in "In this location, in this location!"
To be jealous means that you are afraid that something you own will get taken away by someone else. It's often incorrectly used to mean envious, which is when you want something that someone else has (either material or immaterial).
"Toot sweet" is a common eggcorn (i.e. a nonsense phrase phonetically similar to an actual word or phrase) for "tout de suite", an English expression borrowed from the French meaning "immediately" or "straight away".
Another one is "for all intensive purposes". The correct phrase is "for all intents and purposes". It means "for any possible reason", not "for any intense reason".
It's "pay-per-view", not "paper view". Seriously, I have actually heard people call it "paper view". I have no idea why. "Per" means "for each", i.e. you pay for each view(ing) of the program in question.
"Computer" is not synonymous with "CPU". The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is one of the internal PARTS of the computer as a whole. (That doesn't really have anything to do with grammar, admittedly, but I still think people should be made clear on this.)
There is a saying "One bad apple spoils the bunch, but one good apple can't restore the bad ones". It's often corrupted and shortened into "One bad apple doesn't spoil the bunch", which is completely wrong (both literally and metaphorically).
Similarly, "The proof is in the pudding" is a corruption of the real phrase "The proof of the pudding is in the eating", with "proof" in this context meaning "test".
More an instance of terminology, but still a pet peeve of mine: Octopuses (and I'll talk about that plural in the next entry) do not have tentacles, they have (cephalopod) arms. What's the difference? Tentacles only have suckers on the ends, whereas arms have suckers all down their length.
And yes, octopuses. "Octopi" is an incorrect plural. It's a Greek-derived word (anglicised: Oktopous, meaning "eight foot"), not a Latin-derived one. If it was Latin, it would be "octoped" and the plural would be "octopedes". Technically, "Octopodes" (pronounced "ock-to-POH-dess") is the correct plural, but that's usually considered overly pedantic. "Octopuses" is the commonly accepted plural nowadays. (Some dictionaries do still list "octopi" as an alternative plural, though most point out that it's considered incorrect).
I've seen this mistake come up a lot in the chat too, so I'll just point it out here: The appropriate term is "transgender". Not "transgendered". It's a continuous state of being, not something that happened in the past and has now ended.
"Literally" is a word I will fight for until the day I die. It means "word for word, not figuratively, not as an idiom or metaphor". If you say you could literally eat a horse, I will put a horse in front of you and watch you eat it. Unfortunately, some dictionaries add a second definition of "in effect, virtually", which is the exact opposite of what it really means (and is the way most people incorrectly use it), making it even harder to keep the word from losing its meaning.
"Pedophilia" specifically means sexual attraction to PRE-PUBESCENT children. If you find yourself attracted to an underage teenage character in a TV show/movie/anime/whatever, you are not committing pedophilia, but ephebophilia. (And it doesn't mean "having sex with children" either, it just means a sexual attraction to them. Not all pedophiles are sex offenders.)
An example that no longer applies to modern usage of the word: The word "virgin" originally referred specifically to a GIRL that has never had sex. French and German have their own words for a male virgin (Puceau in French and Jungling in German), but English doesn't.
Of course, Grammar Nazis themselves make some mistakes from time to time. Often, low-level ones will insist on always using "and I" instead of "and me", when in fact the correct phrase varies depending on whether the speaker is the subject or the object of the verb. For example, "John, Steve, Paul and I went to the zoo". The speaker is the subject of the sentence in this case (i.e. the one doing the verb), so "and I" is used. "Steve sent an email to John, Paul and me" uses "and me" because in this case the speaker is the object (i.e. the thing to whom the verb is being done). The easiest way to tell which one to use is to strip off everything except the first person pronoun and see if it still makes sense grammatically. "Me went to the zoo" and "Steve sent an email to I" both don't sound right at all.
"Amateur" just means someone who does something for fun and as a hobby, as opposed to "professional" which means someone who does something as a job and to make money. "Amateur" does not itself mean "bad", even though it's often used that way.
It's "different from" something, not "different to" or "different than". It comes from the Latin differens, meaning "to bring away". You can bring something away FROM something else, but you can't bring something away to something else (well, you can, but that would involve getting it closer, which is the opposite of what the word means), and you can't bring something away than something else either.
Technically, a "spiral staircase" is not a spiral at all but a helix. A spiral is something that extends outwards from a point (or moves inwards towards a point, depending on which way round you look at it).
Also technically, "nauseous" is an adjective, and describes something that MAKES YOU feel sick. The actual feeling itself is "nauseated". Of course, nowadays people use "nauseous" to mean "nauseated" and "nauseating" to mean "nauseous".
If you spot a large bag left alone in an airport, and you think it looks suspicious, then you're wrong. YOU are suspicious of the bag, the bag itself is "suspect".
An example from Spider-Man 2:
Peter Parker: (In response to J. Jonah Jameson wanting to print lies about Spider-Man in the Daily Bugle) You can't print that. That's slander!
JJJ: It is not! I resent that. (softer) Slander is spoken. In print, it's "libel".
"Inferred" and "implied" often get mixed up too. Inferred is on the part of the listener, while implied is on the part of the speaker. Or as the famous saying goes, "You infer, I imply".
"Less" is used with uncountable nouns, such as "air" and "water", etc. For countable nouns, such as "oranges" and "houses", the proper word is "fewer". "Five items or less" in supermarket checkouts is wrong, it should be "five items or fewer".
The grocer's apostrophe is a common grammatical mistake - using apostrophes to make a plural, as grocers were wont to do (and still are, as a matter of fact) - for example, putting a sign above the apples for sale reading "Apple's".
It's "anchors aweigh", not "away". "Aweigh" means "Just drawn out of the ground, and hanging perpendicularly" - in other words, the anchor is raised and the ship is ready to sail.
And for that matter, in naval parlance, a ship is defined as any vessel that moves on the surface of the water, while a boat is any vessel that goes beneath the surface. (Small rowing boats and dinghies are still called boats, though, confusingly enough).
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