# Do you correct people a lot? What's your motivation? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 4, 2024, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-correct-people-a-lot-whats-your-motivation/1009660 "2024-11-04T10:47:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2024, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-correct-people-a-lot-whats-your-motivation/1009660/1 "2024-11-04T10:47:41Z")
A spinoff from a point that came up in [this thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-britishisms-most-baffle-americans-what-americanisms-most-baffle-brits)… Do you routinely or frequently find yourself correcting other people’s grammar, or choice of words? Or do you find yourself telling people that they are doing some activity or action wrong, and should do it a different way? Why do you do it? What, if anything, do you get out of it? What purpose is served by it? What bad things do you feel might happen if you didn’t do it? Full disclosure: my own motivation for asking this question is that I just wonder about the motivation of people who do this. I make online videos and I get ‘corrected’ a lot (not just on grammar and word choices - also on everything else); more than half of the time, the ‘correction’ itself is simply incorrect. More than half of the remaining examples (where the correction is _technically_ correct), it really doesn’t matter at all. Thus, I find myself annoyed by incorrect or unnecessary corrections probably more than the average person, and probably more than I should. A few examples, just for clarity, of some ‘incorrections’ that I frequently encounter: - People told me I shouldn’t use the words ‘trash’ or ‘candy’, because I am English, not American. They’re wrong; those words are also part of British English (and indeed both words appear, for example, in the works of Shakespeare). Also even if they were right, my vocabulary is not enforced like that. - People frequently tell me I am using my can opener in the wrong orientation (I am not; I am using it according to the manufacturer’s directions and it doesn’t actually work in the side-opening orientation they are asserting). - People very frequently tell me _I shouldn’t use_ a can opener on a can that has a pull-tab top (they are right in the notion that the pull tab is there to provide a means of opening the can without a can opener, but they are quite wrong in their imagined notion that the presence of the pull tab somehow forbids the choice or preference of still using a can opener). - People sometimes tell me I shouldn’t say ‘can’ when I mean ‘tin’, again, because I am English, not American and again, they are simply wrong; both words exist in British English. - People often tell me that I prepared a product wrongly - explaining “You’re supposed to…” followed by a description of what is presumably their preferred method, which method is mentioned or implied _nowhere_ on the product packaging. Obviously this thread isn’t exclusively about why people ‘incorrect’ other people (although if you routinely correct people, there’s a fair chance you also accidentally _incorrect_, sometimes) - it’s about correcting in general - I just want to get a better insight of _what drives you to do it_. Also, I recognise that I am not immune to correcting people, so no high horse here. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-correct-people-a-lot-whats-your-motivation/1009660)._