Correct:
family-oriented
Incorrect:
*
newly-established
perfectly-formed
stupidly-written*
People: when an adverb modifies an adjective, it’s perfectly capable of doing so without any help from a hyphen. When the modifier is a noun or another adjective is when the hyphen comes into play.
(Too bleary-eyed to come up with many examples; perhaps the teeming few will do the honors.)
Here’s mine:
Correct:
Bob and I got a blowjob from Sally.
Incorrect:
Sally gave a blowjob to Bob and I.
In the latter case, you would not say “Sally gave a blowjob to I,” would you? Of course not. So don’t say “Bob and I,” either. Say “Bob and me.” You pervert.
Hmm. I fear that I have initiated this thread in altogether the incorrect forum.f
I can’t take issue with these hyphenated constructions, personally. They merely make the sentence flow more transparently. I think people will often subconsciously skip an adverb at first: for example, if I saw the phrase “newly established university”, I’d first register ‘established university’, see the ‘newly’, do a short double-take, and then correct. The hyphens make it obvious.
My rule, when editing/proofing, is Occam’s: eschew all hyphens unless *necessary *for clarity. Your reading strikes me as idiosyncratic, Lama; not a general enough rule for me to dull my razor.
The I/Me thing seriously annoys me, too. Second grade teachers pounded the “NEVER SAY X AND ME, NEVER EVER EVER!” rule into our heads when it’s not even remotely correct.
My boss had an English teacher for a mother, which means he’s pretty much the biggest I/Me violator of all time. “They gave Liz and I a prize” and “Can you give Liz and I a ride home?” make me want to poke him in the eye.
Unless Sally took both of your cocks in her mouth in the same time, this is grammatically incorrect. If she blew you separately then the grammatically correct statement is “Bob and I got blowjobs from Sally.”
Cafe-Society
in lieu of vs in view of
insure vs ensure
“could of”
the apostrophe thing (not least because my daughter’s name ends in “s” and my MIL insists on sticking an apostrophe in front of the “s” GGGGGRRRRRRRRR)
I’m sure there are more.
The one that grates on me is using terms such as “fairly unique,” “very unique.” etc…
Unique means one of a kind. You can’t be “very one of a kind.”
OK.
However, if Bob and I got more than one (separately administered) blowjob from Sally how would this be articulated?
How about the US Constitution? A “more perfect” union?
The use of “hopefully” to mean “I hope.” But I think we’ve lost the battle on that one.
I’ve met Sally, and I hear what you’re saying with “articulated”. Wow.
I hate “try and do x.”
No.
No!
NO! for og sake!
It’s try to do
I was once an offender, but since I’ve been told, I do avoid it.
The one that worries me is every day/everyday. I rarely see this done right anymore. Do you mean “each day” or do you mean “the usual”? [del]Hopefully[/del] I hope people will get better at this!
Been lost for a long time. Even the American Heritage Dictionary admits “*t is not easy to explain why critics dislike this use of hopefully.” Just seems too contrived to me; if ‘hopefully’ modifies the sentence and is perfectly understandable, but you have to work at coming up with a reason to avoid using it, why bother?
My personal peeve is ‘could of’. It started simply as a typo of could’ve, but now people are reading the typo and picking it up as the ‘correct’ usage. I’ve actually heard people enunciate the two words, no mistaking it.
Using apostrophe s to indicate a plural drives me crazy:
"Those dog's are mean."I’ve managed to (mostly) train my inspectors to ‘require work of the contractors’ instead of ‘by the contractors’. My current peeve is that work is to be corrected in ‘an appropriate manner’ instead of ‘the appropriate manner’. What, there’s only one way, and we’re making them guess?
These are really, really esoteric refinements, I’m already translating incoherent scribblings into English that both homeowners and contractors can, I hope, recognize.
This one doesn’t bother me in the least. It can only add to comprehension, and is so far down on the list of grievances as to be immaterial.
“I’m going to sign-up for the class”, on the other hand: Gah!
I saw a perfectly charming set of nesting blocks with wonderful illustrations of nursery rhymes. Wonderful! Until I noticed “Mary had a little lamb, it’s fleece as white as snow”. 
How does that make it through layers of approval and quality control, out to baby stores everywhere? Sucks.
