Using of when you really mean have.
“I knew I should of voted for Clinton”
Using then when you really mean than.
“My new car gets better gas mileage then my old one”
Niiiiiice.
Do or do not. There is no try.
You don’t know that. I can always care less. My indifference has unplumbed depths.
This one grows out of the aural confusion of “should’ve” with “should of”. For the many people who substantially never read and so do all their language learning by ear, this is an easy mistake to make. More so in some dialects and accents than others.
That doesn’t make it right. But it does make the error more understandable.
Literature is a legitimate subject for some scholarly texts. Not just ornithology.
Perhaps so, but the first couple of pages are scientific studies.
People who use the word “nonplussed” to mean the opposite of what it actually means.
Same with “abashed,” “enervated,” and “bemused.”
Ha, wow - as in, the Bikini Atoll tests?
But yes, I recently read an article that said that in light of the troubles and woes facing the Trump campaign, that the Trump campaign was now at “DEFCON 5” mode. What - in light of all these massive, urgent crises, the Trump campaign is now officially hitting the red button and saying, “Everything is OK, normal, no problem?”:smack:
Although…maybe that *is *their way of doing things…
I think that is the point though. By having it so that it can’t go any lower than 1, you hit a ceiling of maximum readiness.
If the ceiling were upwards, then someone might always keep saying, “I want a level of readiness more dire than DEFCON-5.” and then, “We need a level of readiness even more than DEFCON-6. Make it DEFCON-7.”
I don’t think it’s quite the same as “live” - I never hear people say they are “staying” in the house that they own or the apartment where they are on the lease. They’re always “staying” with their mother or their sister, etc. It seems to indicate a non-permanent situation, in the same way I might “stay” at my sister’s when I’m visiting her or having work done on my house.
As Acsenray mentioned, ‘stay’ definitely means ‘reside on a permanent basis’ in Scotland - it caused me slight confusion the first time I encountered it, because I was Staying (in the England-English sense of the word) in a hotel nearby (i.e. in Scotland) - when I replied about the hotel, the person I was talking to said “no, but where do you stay?”.
So if it can mean that in Scotland, why not in other English dialects? Words mean what people accept that they mean (also, it seems wrong that ‘stay’ cannot imply permanence, because in a literal sense, that’s exactly what it *does *mean - it’s the opposite of ‘go’).
I’m not saying it can’t- I’m saying in my experience in the US it doesn’t.
OK - understood.
I don’t know if it’s still used this way, but in some older British texts (older as in Victorian), I have seen the word “stop” used for a less permanent residence. As in, “At which hotel are you stopping?” I’m sure I’ve seen it in Sherlock Holmes, and I want to say I may have seen similar usage in Dickens and Thackeray as well.
That sounds right to me. ‘Overnight stop’ is certainly in current use - so by extension, ‘stop’ still makes sense on its own.
And also, of course, the slightly old-fashioned and somewhat derogatory phrase “dirty stop out”, referring to someone who has made an impromptu - but hopefully enjoyable - overnight stay with a very recent acquaintance.
I wonder about the practicality of some of these errors. When enough people start using the word incorrectly but consistent with each other, as a minimum an acceptable alternative definition exists.
If I’m talking to my co-worker at an IT job and mention a “robin”, there is no confusion. Being in Virginia, he will know I’m talking about Turdus migratorius not Erithacus rubecula - at least in terms of the mental image my words invoke. If I go to Europe on vacation or to the local ornithology club, it might be important to be more specific. To insist that common names are “wrong” is not just pedantic, it is wrong itself.
For decades, there are people who confuse Taiwan with Thailand. It still happens.
It makes no more sense than confusing New York with New Jersey.