Sorry, that’s what I was trying to say!! You can’t add an S to a plural, so you must be meaning to do something else…like use a friggin’ apostrophe.
Which reminds me of another one. My boss Mr. “Smith” had a whole beautiful sign painted up declaring his lake house “The Smith’s”. It’s not clear exactly which Smith the house actually belongs too, but apparently not all of them.
I’m pretty much a descriptivist, so the utterance “I want the talking stopping” seems perfectly valid to me. Of course, it seems to mean a desire for the talking to begin to stop, not to actually stop, so when she says that feel free to talk awhile before winding it down 
Sounds sexy to me!
UGH! I HATE that shit! You can see that all up and down my street.
Sounds awful to me too, although I don’t think you’dve thought any better of her if she had told you to “shut the help up”.
My peeve: “different than.”
“Different” and “than” do not belong together. Ever. Ever ever. See, “than” is a word you use when comparing something quantifiable about two things. “Hotter than,” “uglier than,” and “faster than” are all valid ways to say that one object has more hotness, more ugliness, and more fastness than another.
But one object cannot contain more “differentness” than another. What you want to say, what is correct, is “different from.” FROM. USE FROM, DAMMIT.
I just saw a sign by the side of the road, which made me cringe:
SIGNALIZED RETAIL PAD AVAILABLE
twitch
twitch
First off, the “pad” isn’t “signalized.” If anything is “signalized” it’s the parking lot, to which the pad is associated with. Secondly, “signalized” is just so wrong on so many levels anyone putting that up on a professionally made sign needs to be beaten with a cluebat, until they’ll learn to look up real words.
It also reminded me of a sign I saw the other day.
PERENNIAL
RUSTIC
FURNITURE
So, does that mean they keep growing new rustic furniture every year? And if you leave your rustic stool alone, will it develop into a chaise? What do you use to fertilize your rustic furniture? 
Pedant stepping in.
It’s not all that unusual a construction, although the verbs in question are definitely not usually used in conjunction with each other. It’s grammatically acceptable, though inferior to constructions that don’t imply some ability of the talking to up and develop the idea to stop on its own.
As for my personal language annoyances … I’m head copy editor of three student media organizations. I co-mod a livejournal grammar community. I want to be a professional copy editor.
We don’t want to go there:)
I do want to go here, for a bit:
“If you want to be driven crazy by strange dialect and complete disregard for the conventions of language, try talking to someone from Newfoundland or New Brunswick or Prince Edward Island. Guy asks me a question about his brother. “Where’s 'e to?” “Um, what?” “Where’s 'e to?” “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re asking me.” (exasperated) “Where’s 'e at?” Like I’m a moron because I’ve never heard anyone mangle the language quite so badly before.”
That person is, I’d wager, speaking in a form of the language that’s the norm where he lives. It’s no more wrong than someone saying “'aven’t we got that before, ain’t it so?” when such is acceptable regional speech. It’s not the socially favored dialect, but that dialect is by far not always called for.
Now, if that person were to write for the Wall Street Journal, I’d be right with you in asserting that the person you reference was mangling the language. Regional stuff, though, is hardly a sin on the level of “Employees ‘must’ wash ‘hands’ before returning to ‘work.’”
Boy am I glad this isn’t a thread about French peeves:)
I had a number of peeves that I ranted on in a Pit thread a long time ago. I was immediately descended upon by a legion of outraged dopers who called me a grammar Nazi. I still have the same peeves, but I say less about them now. My momma didn’t raise no stupid people.
Transition is a noun, no matter what the traffic reporter on the six o’clock news says. Transition is not a verb! It is not a verb! It is NOT a verb!
“conversate”
And I actually submitted a “True Tales of In-duh-viduals” to Scott Adams with this little gem from a fellow editor. Actually, she was the lead editor and said the following, three times, in a staff meeting, “So this year, we’re going to be extra viligant…”
I looked around, *at the room full of editors * and realized that either I was the only person who’d noticed or everyone else has a really great poker face.
[slight hijack]
Hey, 'punha, haven’t seen you 'round in a long time! ::slaps ass:: How are ya?
[/hijack]
Er, what exactly did you notice? I’m not a fan of using the word “vigilant” to describe anything that doesn’t involve guns and knives, but I don’t think I see the error.
Language changes:) Nobody–last I checked–has the authority to freeze a word as one and only one thing.
Maybe not, but the use of “anymore” to mean “these days” makes me want to rip peoples’ fingernails off. YMMV.
Vigilant means to watch something very closely. Like, you keep a vigil. You are vigliant in making sure you lock the house every morning.
viligant is not a word, that I’m aware of.
[Note placement of “g” and “l”.]
Hey, I’m with you, circumstances allowing. I work at a lit mag, an internet mag and a newspaper. At the newspaper, no way in goddamn hell is anyone going to use anymore in a statement like “Anymore, I use it like that.” (Unless we’re quoting someone.)
At the internet mag, it’d take a lot for me to allow something like that to be run in seriousness and other than for the sake of giving an example of dialectic speech.
At the lit mag, I’d allow it if the writing were good enough for it. Prestige English is not a requirement, but someone writing the way they do back home is not sufficient defense for printing strong non-prestige dialect.
It sounds ugly, but it’s dialect. But then, I use ain’t, and my contraction inventions seemingly dictate that I take pity on the occasional intelligent soul who’s been raised to believe that anymore as an affirmative adverb (so to speak).
:eek: She said viligant? Soft or hard G? Nobody noticed? That’s wild, man.
Just out of curiosity, would you have published Zora Neale Hurston? (Please don’t read any racial undertones into the question, I’m using her as an example of the intentional literary use of full-on slang in basically every line (of dialogue, at least; can’t quite remember if the narration was like that too). Basically, would you publish someone who used slang the whole way through intentionally in that way?)
I’ve no reason to assume malice, so no worries:)
However, bear in mind that while I’m exec board at each of the three mentioned media orgs, I’m not the only vote. At the lit mag, most stuff (except what comes in late) gets put before everyone who’s at the particular meeting where it’s vetted. My vote counts the same as anyone else’s. At the Internet mag, each piece that gets run theoretically goes past a minimum of three people: me, the section manager and the executive director. At the newspaper, each piece theoretically goes past no fewer than four people: me, the section editor, the managing editor and the editor in chief.
If someone is going to take artistic license, the final product should justify it. If someone is trying to reproduce a certain dialect for sufficient (as, of course, determined by those who vote on it) reason, and the medium is appropriate, I’ll surely vote for it. Further, I’m much more sympathetic (for reasons I’m not sure I can fully, let alone adequately, explain) to dialect dialogue than dialect narration; if nothing else, the average short fiction piece will have much less dialogue than narration, meaning it’s less work for the average reader, who, even having gotten into college, can’t exactly be trusted to know what summat means.
Someone using something other than newspeak for a newspaper article would almost certainly not get that story run like that. Standards are different, of course; for a newspaper, unless it’s an Op-Ed or a columnist writing to a local audience, my understanding is that you want a generic tone, which regional dialect is probably not going to approach, let alone meet.
For the Internet magazine, it would depend a lot on the piece. I would be disinclined to run a straight news piece written in any dialect perceived as being inferior just as I would be disinclined to run something written as for a scientific journal; the audience calls for a different tone and will probably not understand something loaded with jargon and such things. However, we’ve also run things that exercised considerable license. (I’ve written some of them.)
So, basically, I can see situations where I’d go with something written in a nonstandard dialect in the case of the internet mag, and certainly in the case of the lit mag, but almost surely not the newspaper.
Well, Mr. Smartypants, I’m sure you meant to say quote/unquote “fewer” smart and quote/unquote “fewer” educated, instead of quote/unquote “less”. Sheesh.
“People Who Hew” is a decent band name.
Meh, I’ve given up on bad usage altogether… partly because there’s no point getting your blood pressure up over something that is only going to get 10x worse than you could ever possibly imagine, and people don’t know any better anyway.
For me the lowest circle in hell is businessman fraternity jargon. You know, the low-hanging fruit, herding cats, drinking from a fire hose, synergizing the core competencies.
In the latter category, the latest verbal turd that’s being dropped around the office goes: “It is what it is.” You can’t comment on anything, you can’t argue with anybody, because “it is what it is.” Thank you, department of redundancy department, for giving us a weaselly official way to say “your agreement with the obvious truth of my statement is taken as a foregone conclusion”.
In New York, Third World immigrant merchants have largely given up on the idea that nouns can be plural. Go down to the wholesale district and you will see sign after sign advertising “SHIRT - HAT - CAP - NECKTIE”. (Sometimes NECKTIE is accompanied by its Spanish plural, CORBATAS, but NECKTIES is never ever used.)
In midtown, delis indulge in the same affliction. Many maintain a 2nd floor seating area, usually marked with a sign (sometimes quite a nicely made one) saying: “UPSTAIR.”