Well, the situation has stabilized in the second half of the thread, but, honestly, I was afraid for a while that Gaudere’s Law was going to collapse from overuse.
One more thing…
you do not write a person. You write TO them.
…continuing to fight agains US english, and americanisation… (the good fight, if you were wondering)
My personal pet peeve is when people substitute “advice” and “advise”.
Advice = noun.
Advise = verb.
That is all.
(PS - I’m pretty sure I’ve made the typo mentioned in the OP, so I really have no right to complain. It just picks my butt, is all.)
The “h” is silent. Like, duh!!
heh 
This one drives me nuts too… Especially when its on a sign, i.e. ANTIQUE’S
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAarrrrgh!
shammy, haven’t you figured out that correcting adults on their grammar/spelling/usage is futile? If they haven’t learned it by now, they never will… Unless you’re teaching grammar/spelling/usage to a class full of willing adults, you ain’t gonna get nowhere (yes, that was intentional).
Whoops. This should be it’s!
I swear that I cannot post to a thread about grammar, spelling or usage without making a mistake.
This is and interesting thread.
and/or
she/he or worse s/he
Just pick ONE!
That’s the one that really ticks me off.
Oh, I know what I’m getting myself into when I start. But, sometimes, I just can’t help myself. After the 40th “and they said there gonna be their tonight to” It’s either say something or have my head explode. 
I know that my grammar and usage is not perfect and I’m lucky I can spell my own name correctly sometimes; however, I know that my friends are smart enough to have a handle on the basics (my little sister has her Masters for God’s sake) and it drives me insane when they don’t care enough to even try to use their own language properly.
I do try to be good. I never say anything when my friend Chris tells me that she has a “photogeneric memory”
I know I should just keep my mouth shut. They don’t care so this is just a “mute” point anyway (or is that a “moo point”?)
b]Stoid**, there’s a unique restaurant in my town, Spirits on the River, that serves Native American cuisine. No other restaurant in Asheville serves Native American cuisine.
There is, however, a more unique restaurant in town: it serves chargrilled Martian brains in jellied gravitational field. No other restaurant in the known universe serves chargrilled Martian brains in jellied gravitational field.
According to my American Heritage dictionary, there can indeed be degrees of uniqueness.
Daniel
Burn your “dictionary” - it is hellspawn.
“Unique” is binary - as is “pregnant” - it is or it is not.
The words are “per se”. “Persay” is not a word. Thanks.
“Aren’t I”??? As far as I know, that’s correct (and yes, I do have very good grammar). You wouldn’t say “Yes, I’m very good at that, aren’t me” (or “isn’t me”).
That being said, I and me are definitely my pet peeves - I can’t stand when someone says “between you and I” or “me and Rachel went to the store.”
In the few instances I do say a grammar mistake (I sometimes have trouble with saying “Pete and I, we went to the store,” which I know is incorrect in English, but then, I’m fluent in french and it’s perfectly acceptable there, so my brain sometimes clicks over into that mode or something), my stepmother has been known to correct me which makes me really nuts. I have better grammar than most people, and here she is correcting me, an adult, when half the time I either knew I made the mistake, or else it was kind of a free flowing thought (“Pete and I…(pause), we went…”). So even if my grammar wasn’t good, I’d still probably resent being corrected.
Thankfully I work in a good bookstore and the people I work with have good grammar.
Sivalensis wrote:
If “aren’t I?” were correct, then so would be “I are not”. Aren’t I = Are not I.
I am
You are
He, She, It is
We are
You are
They are
I’m right, am I not?
The apostrophes bug me too - I saw a sign in a store window at Disney that said something like “present’s for christmas” or something along those lines. Ack!
Also, the whole to, too, two and most especially their, there, they’re (this gets really abused even here on smdb)
Sivalensis:
Libertarian is right. That would be “I are not.” You want “I am not”.
The grammatically correct expression therefore is, of course, “Ain’t I?”
yes, you could say “am I not,” but when we’re used to using contractions for words, “am I not” sounds really formal and kind of old. If you want to make a contraction out of it, then the closest to “am I not” would be “ain’t I” and that just isn’t going to fly with good grammar people. Is aren’t I not in the dictionary? I’ve heard it from professor I thought (not that that means it’s good usage, just that it’s in common usage)
People probably started using “aren’t I” as a way to get around saying “ain’t I” which isn’t considered grammatically correct anymore (at least in my classrooms it wasn’t), even if it would be technically so. “Aren’t I” would change to “I are not” which is far from correct, but somehow it seems to fly with grammaticists more than ain’t
The Usage Panel grammarians (I don’t think “grammaticists” is a word) have found the illogical “aren’t I” to be acceptable in speech (but not writing). On this matter, the Usage Panel is weak-kneed and foolish. “Ain’t I” is much more logical.