All this bad usage of grammar literally upsets me.
I mean, I’m upset. *Literally, literally * upset.
Oh woodstockbirdybird, the copywriters from my ad agency would like to have a word with you.
There a bit phased.
You’ll take some flack for that.
My favorite is “I could care less.”
LISTEN to what you’re saying! If you could care less, that means you DO care, not that you don’t. Arg! :mad:
If the new face cream made you really happy then you could say that you got a positive affect from it. 
I was shopping yesterday and saw an decorative product, something like a shadow box with little girly trinkets, bright pink accents, etc., inside, with the title across the top:
Girl’s Rule!
Some manufacturer somewhere has churned out hundreds or thousands of this product–Good God, people may even be buying it and putting it up in their homes.
And around here, many folks have handpainted, artistic house signs you know they had specially made:
The Smith’s
So which one member of the Smith family owns the house and is acknowledged by the sign?
And don’t get me started on using quotation marks instead of bolding, underlining, etc.
That makes me want to find the manufacturer and burn his or her house down.
No no no no! I had it and now I lost it again! :mad:
I have posted this before but it’s a good one. Charles, one of my co-workers, had an emergency and had to miss work one day. The email that was sent by his manager was as follows:
Here is another one from a different co-worker at a different job. She posted her opinion about something and the last sentence was:
It was a few hours later when it finally dawned on my what she meant to say.
Haj
Yep, I knew that. I was totally plussed.
There’s a couple of explanations on that one: Steven Pinker (respected linguist and author of The Language Instinct) claims the intonation is clearly sarcastic and, if you listen to how people say the phrase, you do realize that the intonation is not the same as a simple declaritive sentence. Notice the difference between the stress and intonation in the literal “I couldn’t care less” and the sarcastic “I could care less.” Now, the argument is that if sarcasm were implied, “could” should be stressed, not “care.” I dunno. It sounds sarcastic to me either way, but not everyone agrees on this. Undeniably, though, it is said with a different intonation than a straight reading of “I could care less.”
The second, simpler, explanation is that it’s an idiom. Idioms don’t have to be literal.
Gah! I see this all the time, every where from signs to students’ resumes.
My favorite instance remains a medical building in a nearby town which read:
The “Dentists”
I got a huge kick out of it every time I drove by, to the extent I’d point it out to passengers in the car, but someone must have clued them in, because the quotation marks have been removed.
And when you said last night you were in the throws of passion…
was that some kinky wrestling fantasy, or what?
Quotes for emphasis.
We Are Having A "Sale!"
Ask About Our "Specials"
We “Do” Offer Discounts
Our Coffee Is The "Best!"
It makes me, and the baby Jesus, cry.
Another, perhaps more personal pet peeve, is one of my best girlfriends…her automatic signature at the end of every email is something she made up. But she puts it in quotes and then puts her name at the end.
“So it looks really stupid and I’ve tried to tell her that if you’re the one talking, you don’t have to put it in quotes, much less indicate who said it, because it’s obvious and you don’t quote yourself, but she steadfastly refuses to listen to reason. So every time she emails me, I finish it feeling irritated.” —Audrey Levins