My boss keeps using the past tense when he should be using the past participle.
“I should have went…”
“I could have ran…”
I do not understand how a college educated technology company president can do this.
When I was an office manager for a few years back in the 1990s, I hired a number of women for clerical jobs who had *business school *diplomas, but couldn’t have constructed a coherent business letter to save their lives. I had to proofread everything they read before it was sent out (fortunately, correspondence was not a big part of their jobs). Education is no guarantee of an ability to communicate well.
I once worked in a research environment with some of the brightest people in the country. Mostly Ph.D.'s.
I was told I would need to help these people with the use of computers. Help them use the computers, print things out, and so forth. (I thought Yea right!)
To my amazement, many of these people were absolutely brilliant in their particular field of study, but could not do the most basic things, such as balance a checkbook or print something out on a computer.
Those formulations are indicative of certain regional dialects. So while “wrong” for formal communications they are standard speech in some areas.
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Better than the tech CEO a senior programmer and I were meeting with who talked about the new “paradiggem” we were using for software development. He wasn’t being funny. Programmer and I peeeeeeeked at each other under our brows, got through the meeting, and absolutely blew up laughing once we were safely back on our floor.
He grew up in some combination of NYC and suburban Baltimore. He also mangles some figures of speech. “It’s important we all are together on this–we have to be in lock step and barrel.”
I had an eighth-grade English teacher who pronounced epitome to rhyme with STEP-me-home. My friend and I did that same peek and actually educated her after class. She took it well.
One of my employer’s upper management pronounced the word ‘statutes’ with an extra syllable; i.e. ‘STA-choo-it’.
I once heard a pharmacist in a radio interview refer to ongoing research into treating diabetes with ‘gilla monster’ venom.