For Fuck's Sake, "It's" means It Is, "Its" means "belonging to it"!

That should be “doophus”. :frowning:

…and anuvver fing that gets my goat…

It’s no-one not noone

innit?

Idiot: I’m smart, aren’t I?

Doper: Yes, and I are too!

Shouldn’t that be “And anuvva fing wot gets my goat?”

And yeah, bruv, it can be “no-one” or “no one.”

Now you are getting into the spirit. Misuse of apostrophes is equivalent to putting puppies in ovens.

A wonderful book for anyone who felt it necessary to post to this thread:
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

From the review:

Puppies cant putt. They’re paws cant grasp the putter. And they most definately cant putt in ovens. Its two hot.

I don’t think Christ would have cared that much. In fact, his English wasn’t that good either, as far as I can recall.

And he might even have disapproved of your vulgar language.

And if you’re referring to his ice cream sandwich, then you’d say:

It’s Itt’s It’s It

Apparently, Arkansas’ legislature are getting in on some of this action, too. Or should I say, “Arkansas’s.”

I had multiple copies smuggled in from the U.K. before it was published in the U.S. :cool:

Akshully its (heh) "an annuver fing wot gets me goat

There’s a current Pit thread title that’s been driving me absolutely bonkers:

“To those who don’t think criminals are different than you and I”

No, I think criminals are different from you and me.

Again, this one has an easy-peasy way to see if you’ve got the right construction–remove the “you and” part and see if it makes any sense. “A criminal is different from I?” No, “a criminal is different from me.” Assuming, of course, that there actually is a difference, y’know. :wink:

As for the “different than” construction, I myself infinitely prefer to consider it just wrong, full stop, but I did find a more lenient interpretation here:

Maybe grammar errors just bug me more in thread titles because they hang around longer and I have to see them, as opposed to grammar errors in individual posts, which only piss me off once… :wink:

Another homophone that needs to be mercilessly crushed before it’s becomes a frontline issue:

. . . that doesn’t jive with what we already know.

There was a Sr. Vice President at my last company who found a way to fit this into almost every one of her emails, and all the parrots in the office subsequently started saying it in every conversation.

Unless the letter before the Y is a vowel (Day/Days, Abbey/Abbeys)

Hmm. I expected to see at least one “get with the times, you old fuddy duddies” post by now.

How about this: If the rules are so complicated that lots of people are making the same common mistakes, maybe we need to change the rules.

Or maybe: If you understood what he was trying to say, where’s the problem?

I think you’re too late to do anything about this one. Better to get used to it. I’d bet that if you took a random survey on the street, you’d get the vast majority saying “jive” is correct usage here. If you offered “jibe” as an alternative, I think you’d get a lot of blank stares.

Sez who? Who makes these “rules”?

(Hint- no generally accepted body, no governmental body. There are a dozen or so prescritive stylebooks, which all disagree. There are a couple descriptive stylbooks- and they argees “If it is easily understandable and in comon usage, it’s fine”)

I definitely have to watch my spelling.

I knew I’d forget something – yes, this one, too. It’s fun just keeping it straight in my own head.

I’d rather this not turn into a prescriptivism/descriptivism debate, nor one on whose book is “more correct.” Without digging down into the niggling bits of grammar that linguists debate endlessly over, the vast majority of these rules are just common sense. They are intended to provide clarity of expression by providing guidelines that eliminate ambiguous constructions. Word forms whose meanings may be obvious when used a particular way in certain contexts may not be when used the same way in other contexts. When you create ambiguities by failing to define rules on such usage, you just end up confusing the people who are trying to learn how to use it properly.

I fail to see a problem with defining and adhering to rules of language, and citing a lack of concrete definition by a governing body seems like a bit of a straw man to me.

There was a time when I thinked that was true. Not anymore.