Arrr! The reflexive “myself!” (and: Arrr! The sentence fragment! ;)).
I was in a meeting last week about our uni’s charity golf outing. The guy in charge of organising it (meeting with the country club) repeatedly said things like (and I’m serious) “Myself will meet with the manager and discuss that.”
I don’t think they saw me quietly seizuring from hearing that, though.
I don’t get it. What’s wrong with that? 
The correct word is “past”. In the sentence “go past the old oak tree”, past is an adverb. Passed, however, is the past (ha!) tense of the verb “to pass”. You might say “he passed the old oak tree”, but the two usages are not interchangeable. In the first sentence past is telling you how to go (you go past), but in the second, passed is telling us what he did.
I didn’t have a huge :smack: moment when I first heard this because “think” sounds improbable. I’m prejudiced in favor of “thing”, having grown up with it, and, despite what you may think, “think” in place of “thing” does not sound obviously correct. In fact, it sounds as if the person using “think” is trying to make a detestable little joke, and not succeeding. As I’ve said, it doesn’t make more sense to me, and I’m not in the habit of reading dictionaries for phrase usage.
Boy, is this horse dead!
Since you are not speaking in Elizabethan English then you think that either the language should stop evolving now or you are selective in how you try to police the language. Not that I have a problem with that. If we don’t keep fighting irregardless will become a word. We just have different pet peeves.
Beat that dead horse some more. You are defending an ungrammatical saying. The proper form would be “If you think that you have another thought coming”. A thought is a thing so it can be replaced by it in the saying. I personally have never had a think in my life, have you? 
Unless you don’t think at all, you have, according to Dictionary.com:
So there! 
Using a dictionary to prove your argument is not fair .
I don’t know where dictionary.com got that but the version of Webster’s that I have on my desk has 8 definitions but does not have that one. The only noun form is thinker. Maybe its that way in English but not American.
I have a theory about why this one is so persistent. It persists because it really winds up with the same meaning either way:
I couldn’t care less. The meaning is obvious here.
I could care less, to me, has a more sarcastic spin which more than makes up for the missing negative. It does so because the speaker implying that, by great effort, has managed to muster up a smidgen of caring, but the meaning is still obviously that s/he doesn’t.
Don’t know if that makes it right, though.
“Narcotic” != “any illegal, exotic, or addictive drug”, though that’s another lost battle. Meth and LSD are not narcotics.
Grrrrr . . . Another one, courtesy of All Things Freakin’ Considered, of all places . . .
“Choosing between the lesser of two evils.”
You can choose between two evils.
You can choose the lesser of two evils.
You cannot choose between the lesser of two evils.
Cripes!
There’s one that you see a lot on these very forums - ‘As far as…’ without the accompanying ‘…is concerned’. Maybe it’s an American idiom, but it looks dead wrong to me. As far as what?
Then there’s ‘begs the question’ which is so routinely misused that I can’t even remember what it the correct meaning is. It doesn’t, or didn’t originally, mean ‘raises the question’. Something to do with circular arguments, I think.
I’m also unaccountably annoyed by ‘here, here’ (it’s ‘hear’, you fools) and ‘by far and away’ (‘by far’ or ‘far and away’, make your mind up).
Here’s another one that I heard today on NPR.
It seems that fewer and fewer people know that phenomena is the plural of phenomenon.
It was a guest on ATC, and not one of the paid, “I should know how to speak the damned language, it’s my job” hosts.
Except that the quote there is from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. I’m betting it’s American. It is however unabridged, so that might explain why the noun form is missing in your dictionary.
And now people who are too lazy to say (or write) “probly” are using “prolly.”
The distinction between *loose *and *lose *is disappearing, as it is between *site *and sight.
And we had a judge use *disinterested *when he meant uninterested, in an article in the paper the other day. A judge. Jeez.
Oh, and a decent coffee is espresso, not expresso.
THANK you. I agree wholeheartedly. Even worse is when people say this aloud.
A good number of my friends say “I seen” instead of “I saw” in sentences. “I seen a blue bird today!” It’s common where I’m from to say “seen” instead of “saw”, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Extra bonus section! Now you can help me fight some of my own ignorance. No matter what, I get terribly confused with lie and lay. When do you lie down and when do you lay down? Are you laying down or lying down? Do you say “I laid down” or is it “I lay down” for past tense? “I lied down” sounds totally wrong. I tend to just avoid saying these things and just go with “I was sleeping”, but I want to know this once and for all! Help! brain explodey
You “lay down” only when you are laying something down, because lay is a transitive verb. Lie is intransitive. So you would be “lying down” on a bed, but “laying down” paving stones, say. The confusion perhaps comes from the fact that the past tense form of ‘lie’ is 'lay. Laid is the past tense, and past participle, of ‘lay’. So it’s “I lay down”, but “the chicken laid an egg”.
“to improperly take for granted” He’s got a nice list of stuff. I only fail on a few.
Speaking of Greek singulars vs. plurals, I had a boss who used to say “parenthese” (pronounced pa-REN-thuh-see.) I guess he figured that if more than one of the things are called parentheses, one must be a parenthese.
But loose and lose are both pronounced differently and spelled differently, whereas at least sight and site are homophones. Irregardless ;), they both drive me crazy.
Though sight and site are both real words, the loss of an understanding of their difference reminds me of another disturbing trend: the “simplification” of the spelling of words that contain “gh.” I suspect that 100 years from now, “through” will look positively Chaucerian, “thru” having become universal. “Night” may even suffer the same fate. “Doughnut” is already a lost cause.
When I was tutoring the SAT II Writing test, I told kids that “lie” is “to recline”, and “lay” is “to set down”.
I’m going to lie down.
Lay that anywhere.
Don’t let the dog lie in the mud!
I’m helping to lay some carpet.
The real confusion comes in using the other tenses.
Conjugation of LIE:
I lie down today. (present tense)
The money lay there yesterday. (past tense)
Sarah will lie down there tomorrow. (future tense)
The book has lain here many times before. (use perfect tense with have, had, has)
Conjugation of LAY:
I lay the book down. (present tense)
I laid it down yesterday. (past tense)
I will lay it down again tomorrow. (future tense)
I have laid it here many times before. (use perfect tense with have, had, has)