The one grammatical error that is like bamboo shards under fingernails to me is substituing “and” for the indefinite article “an”.
“This is and event that no one should miss”
I can’t read those sentences on first try. My mind tries to parse it as a conjunction and eventually slams into a terminal punctuation mark with clauses still dangling in midair and I have to start over from the beginning of the sentence.
I’ve pitted this, in fact; apologists claimed that it was “just a typo” but I don’t believe that. I see it too often, and hardly ever the other way around (e.g., “It bugs me when people mispronounce an misspell words”). There has to be some significant degree of confusion about what word to use to account for this.
“Says” instead of “said”
Another vote for “Goes” instead of “said” or “say”
[sidebar] I swear I heard my eldest daughter say the following to her sister:
“I says she goes ‘I wents to all the store in the mall …’”.
She’s 32 years old – (If I’d had a baseball bat within reach I swear I would have beat her to within an inch …) [/sidebar]
Another vote for the it’s its thing.
And yet one more vote for worsh – and worshington. Where the hell did anybody ever see an ‘r’ in Washington? (Ya thin’ maabe its wuz at worshingtune mumument?)
What about “sammich?” When I hear people say that I always want to reply with some variation of, “Aww, how cute! You’re as illiterate as your three-year-old!”
Role vs. roll. Where I work, the corporate reporting communications person has got this one wrong a couple of times.
Past vs. passed
Unnecessary apostrophes, especially its/it’s
Aks for ask… Come on. It’s a three-letter word, can you not sound it out???
Affect vs. effect. I had a huge argument by proxy with the marketing department of the company Mr. Dr.Woo used to work for when they were putting out a really important press release in which they misused this. Unbelievable – not only were they misusing it, but they refused to look it up and correct it when it was pointed out.
Alot is not a word. At least not in English. Even Microsoft spell check knows this.
The complete and utter lack of understanding of participles. For a while I thought dropping the –ed in common speech of was just laziness, but now I see it in written communications too. So my local grocery store has an aisle that, according to the sign posted above it, is the CAN FOOD area. Hey!! It’s CANNED FOOD, you dorks.
Data IS, rather than data are. I especially hate it when I do it!
My darling hubby pronounces ‘ceviche’ as ‘serviche’. Why? He can read – he even makes it, so he sees how it’s spelled in the recipe.
The beauty of snobbery and irrationalism is that it overrides the so-called objectivity of sociolinguistic analysis. The fact that the locals might pronounce their own town (if you can describe a town people happen to be born in as in some way belonging to them) in a certain way is of no moment whatsoever to those who decide or perpetuate social mores and attitudes. And I think the pronunciation of Shrewsbury provides as good an example of a shibboleth as you can find in England.
“I seen him running down that way and…” Can’t the local news interview people who have, you now, an education? In fact, I can only recall one time when someone actually used the proper “saw,” and I was literally stunned. Literally.
Not exactly a grammar error or mispronunciation, but it bugs the hell out of me when people say: **“It’s like having your cake and eating it too!” ** The correct phrase is: “It’s like eating your cake and having it too” which makes a lot more sense because any time you have some cake you can also eat it, but you can’t eat your cake and then still have it. It’s the impossibility of the latter that indicates that the subject is getting some sort of special or unlikely “two-fer”.
Similarly, the whole **“I could care less” ** nonsense when the utterer actually means “I couldn’t care less” really irks me as well.
I live near a town whose sports team is called the Jaguars. About 90% of the people around here pronounce it “the Jag-wires”. Where the hell do they get that from? It’s not like they’ve never seen the spelling of the word before.
I see both of these more as “cute-isms” than mispronunciations. I say “sammich” and “punkin” but I say them both very deliberately so as to purposely sound like an innocent kid who is thrilled with the prospect of getting either.
“Mmmmmmm…let’s go eat some sammiches before we go to the punkin patch!”
