YES!!! That lay/lie thing is the most horrible mistake ever, and it is on the verge of becoming accepted usage!! If it ever makes it to the dictionaries I’m going to kill myself!
And as for those who say, “I could care less”, have they even thought about it for a second? What does that even mean?
they’re there your you’re its it’s
apostrophe’s anywhere
I could care less.
ect… ect… one day Im going to make a list of the one’s i get in emale. its scary.
Well, they intend “I couldn’t care less”, but they get lost somewhere along the line.
Yes, I know that’s what they intend, but I wonder if they are aware that they are saying the exact opposite. I just think that people can make spelling mistakes because they really don’t know how to spell the word, and are too lazy or don’t have enough time to look it up, but some grammatical mistakes are just completely meaningless. I once read this on a websites: “There was a one and a thousand chance that my baby would be born with this”. A one and a thousand chance?? As in, 1001 chances?
Contender for the most common typo has to be:
You car needs washing.
I also see no need in most cases, for the longer version of words like orientated/oriented and inflammable/flammable.
utilized/used are two different words, and it bugs me when “utilize” is used for “use”.
Dalmation
Succede/Succession (where secede/secession is the word they’re looking for)
Ghandi
Marshall (where Marshal is correct, as in Fire Marshal)
precedent / precident / president
I have such a hard time with this one!! Is it “I need to lie down for a bit”? God, I hope so, because that is the one I usually choose.
My vote goes to cite/site. [sub]hope no one did this one. I broke my steadfast rule of reading the whole thread before posting.[/sub]
cite: a source, short for citation. “Got a cite for that?”
site: a website. Could be used as a cite.
To almost everything, I’ll agree. I think the ones I see most often that bug me are you’re/your, they’re/there/their, and to/too/two.
But I have more than just a ‘me, too!’ On the subject of the way that spellcheckers tend to make the world lazy in their usage, I have an anecdote.
I used to do tech support for a desktop publishing application. About once a month, someone would call asking us to take a word out of the spelling dictionary that came with the software. Often, they would be incensed that removing words from the dictionary wasn’t a feature of the software or angry because a word was in our dictionary at all. All the techs could say was that the word was spelled correctly, and the checker said so, therefore the software was working. As far as wether the word was the appropriate one for their document, we couldn’t do anything about that. It was hard to feel much sympathy for publishers that couldn’t proofread.
The word they had written wrong was, in almost every case, ‘public’.
Of course, the users most angry that our program hadn’t alerted them to a missing letter were the ones that had printed their publication with the error and had it pointed out by their client after the document was distributed far and wide. Some of these were church newsletters.
Brynda, it depends. I would say “lie”, but if the “myself” is implied, then it would be “lay”. You probably have little problem with “sit” and “set”. Well, “lie” and “lay” (as present tense) are similar. You lie down. You lay something down. You sit down. You set something down. The prayer “now I lay me down to sleep…” uses “lay” correctly, because there is an object, “me” there.
-Another
I tried to teach my dog to lie down only when someone says “Lie down!” and to ignore them if they say “Lay down”. But it made him confused. Now he won’t obey either request.
-Another
Good for you, Another Primate. You deserve a medal.
Don’t try that one with the police:
“Drop your weapon and lay down on the ground”
“Well, actually, it’s supposed to be lie down”
“Drop your weapon!, lay down”
“Nonono, you don’t understand, listen…”
<sound of gunfire>
Dipping my toe into somewhere it really doesn’t belong . . .
breathe/breath - One’s a verb one’s a noun - don’t interchange them
advise/advice - Same deal.
This is the only board I frequent and I see this error ALL the time.
:check spelling, preview, check spelling again, cross fingers, prepare for ridicule:
I like it when folks screw up common saying and such. For example “all itensnsive purposes”, let’s get down to “brass tax”, etc.
I also want to throw my vote behind “loser-looser”, because it is usually involves some delicious form of irony when the person using it is generally trying to degrade someone else.
By far the most common spelling errors on the internet are “amatuer” and “lesbain”. Erm… at least that’s what a friend of mine tells me.
I do use that phrase on occasion, and I’ve never understood why so many grammar purists object to it.
Just say it, out loud. What tone of voice do you adopt when you say it? For me, the only way I can say that phrase is in a tone of obvious sarcasm.
I could care less… (but not much less).
I could care less… (but it would be hard to do so).
In fact, I’ve even heard people say the entire phrase:
I could care less…if I cared at all.
“Hone in on.”
You HONE something by making it sharper. Hone a razor, a knife, or an argument.
You HOME in on something by targeting it; pigeons home in on the loft, smart bombs home in on the target, GPS helps you home in on your destination.
I used to work for the ABC Radio Network in 1975 (76? anyway…) and we had a female newscaster whose writing was pretty atrocious. One day she announced that there had just been a small “tremblor” in California. After she got off the air, I pointed out gently and even deferentially, that people sometimes confused the Spanish word “temblor” with the English word “tremor” when speaking of small earthquakes, but that there was no such words as “tremblor.”
“Yes, there is,” she snapped.
“No, really there isn’t,” I said, perhaps a trifle tartly.
“I just made it up!” she answered and stormed out.
So THAT’S where these things come from: idiots in high places with big egos.
I been thining about doing my first Pit rant on the your / you’re thing.
In the meantime, I also often see coming down the pipe instead of the correct phrase coming down the pike.
thinking…