There’s a school of thought that coulda, shoulda, wanna have all become good words in their own right.
That certainly works for me.
Singular they, no problems with it. People have tried for years to get a gender neutral singular pronoun to catch on, and it hasn’t worked. They was already halfway there. It may not be what some would choose, but it’s better to have it than to not have anything.
Generic he – ugh. No.
Themselves – I have no strong position on this. Whatever develops is fine with me.
Whom – I am essentially a professional writer of formal work product. I write around it. I don’t want to use “who” when it “should” be “whom,” but I hate using “whom.” Sounds stilted and stuffy to me. Also, people overcorrect, and that also really bugs me.
Prepositions, on accident, try and – I don’t care about ending on a preposition (though I do care about eliminating extraneous words, so no “Where is she at?”). On accident sounds wrong to my ears, but I suppose it could become acceptable over time. Try and is just wrong. The meaning is different from try to.
A while and all right – I follow the rules, but I don’t have strong feelings about it.
Oxford comma is better.
Comprises – I have to know how to use them correctly for editing others’ work, but I don’t like either one, so I don’t use them myself.
Flaunt and flout should mean different things. It’s getting muddy though, which is a shame. I will continue to use them as their separate concepts.
Could of/should of. I consider these to be typos for could’ve and should’ve. In my accent, pronounced exactly the same. I can understand how they happen. They should be corrected in edited text.
Another one that bugs me is “I” vs. “me.” What bugs me the most is when people “overcorrect” and use “I” to try to sound more formal when they should actually use “me.”
Like, “He gave my sister and I a present.” It’s easy to check which you use just by substituting he or she vs. him or her, and drop out any extra people. Most people can correctly write “He gave her a present.” Or, in the above example, it’s enough to just drop out “my sister” to see that it’s wrong.
Subjunctive mood is another that even people who think they know the rule mess up, because they apply it incorrectly to past conditional statements.
I never understood why they hammered on a great deal so much. Never once, as far as I can recall, was many or much suggested.
I have two wolves inside of me. One is the editor. The other is the linguist. They are constantly at war.
The linguist doesn’t give much of a damn about what’s called “proper,” only about how people in any given dialect use the language. And the editor is always aware that my client’s reputation is on the line and could possibly suffer from as little as a single use of alright (you know how the internet is).
That’s overblown, to be sure. I intentionally included alright a couple of times in a manuscript just to screw with my editor. They never mentioned it, and so far, neither have (as I joke) either of my readers.
That, definitely! It’s almost like me has become a dirty word.
Something I see often here in the SDMB: “Anyways”. I see it’s now defined as informal or dialect, but if you don’t want to sound like an ignorant hick, the word is “anyway”.
And doesn’t anybody respect the difference between “number” and “amount”? I hear professional journalists speak of “the amount of people”. Unless they’re in Soylent Green, it’s “number”.
Ah, sorry, I didn’t click on the link to the other thread. Now that I have, I can’t see a Stephen King passage in the few posts above yours, and I’m not going to search.
A lot is sort of informal, but sometimes that’s what you want. Formality markers actually have their uses.
Which would sound more natural, “I saw a lot of people at the bus stop today,” or “I saw a great deal of people at the bus stop today?”
Fiction isn’t really relevant anyway - fiction writers can do what they like. If their readers don’t like it, they won’t buy it. That doesn’t mean fiction writers don’t need proofreaders, because they definitely do (and late-90s Stephen King would have benefited from one), but not really for things like “a lot.”
I’m not sure how often, if at all, I use it, but “anyways” is attested in print for over 800 years. To my ears, there’s nothing “informal hick” about it. I wouldn’t even have noticed. It’s pretty typical. (Looking at my emails and texts, it appears I very rarely do use it, but the clients, friends, and family I email with use it enough that I don’t notice it as being non-standard.) Other words like that are “toward(s)” “forward(s)” “backward(s).” All of those I encounter and use in both -s and -s-less forms.
We spell it the right way, naturally.
Anyways is fine with me. I wonder if it’s like toward/towards or backward/backwards, where one form is more common in the UK and another is heard more in the US.
Not a real fan of labeling someone as uneducated or stupid based on their dialect.
I don’t, no. It’s a useless distinction in every case I can think of. Much like less/fewer.
AIUI the problem is this:
The book belonging to John is John’s book. Use 's to denote ownership.
When you mean it is or it has, it’s can shows the contraction.
If you need its (possessive) or it’s (it is/it has) there’s a problem.
Every problem has its solution.—shows possession without apostrophe.
It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to—It is my party.
Its/it’s can be very confusing, especially for ESL students. It’s natural to think of its as a possessive like John’s that should take an apostrophe, so I try to steer people toward thinking of it as more like the other possessive pronouns, particularly his. Sometimes, if they can get the idea of how silly hi’s would look, they’ll get it.
It’s in the OP of this thread under A lot, a great deal.
Proofreaders, hell–they need editors. King had editors in the 90s–good ones–but their hands were kinda tied by his popularity. He should have listened to them more.
On my first theme at good old BSU, English 102, I used “everyone…their” or similar twice and an Oxford comma. It cost me three letter grades and the English department didn’t give D grades.
Therefore everyone who makes the same errors deserves to suffer a like consequence. 
I’m not happy with what seems to be the current acceptance of “me and my friends were…” instead of “my friends and I were…”
But perhaps that’s old fashioned etiquette, not grammar.
It’s just etiquette, and it’s fallen out of style to a large degree. There’s no grammatical reason for putting the other person first.
Me and ___________ is dialect, and it’s been around forever. Maybe you’re just seeing it more from the internet or whatever.
Yeah, the “proper” form would be “I and my friends were,” but holy Christ does that sound jarring and just wrong to my ears, no matter how “right” it is. Much like how weird and dramatically formal “It is I” sounds vs the usual “it’s me.” And I’m not sure any English speaker has ever tried the contracted form “it’s I” in actual speech.
Oh! I had no idea there was anything under those bullet points. Am I dumb? I’ve never seen anything like that elsewhere.
Proofreaders, hell–they need editors. King had editors in the 90s–good ones–but their hands were kinda tied by his popularity. He should have listened to them more.
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100% agreed - he definitely suffered from success bloat. Though, funnily enough, he seems to have got better in the last few yew years.
As I’m sure you know, editors would be the ones to say “would this character really say, ‘a lot?’ He’s a Harvard teacher in class in 1965.'” But, since the 90s at least, a proof-reader would pick up actual grammar errors and the like, so they’d correct (or highlight) “could of,” but wouldn’t correct “a lot.” It wasn’t non-standard English then or now.
King also seemed to have no proofreaders in his worst emperor-with-no-clothes period - I don’t think “could of” was in there, but a lot (heh) of others were.
Oh, I’m sorry. I’m familiar with them, so I thought everyone else was, too. My fault!
Could just be me? They just look like bullet points in a different style.
Now that I’ve clicked on them, I’m not going to comment on every bit, even though they’re interesting.
Whom is still useful sometimes. “So, yesterday I waved hello at a man across the street thinking he was a friend of mine, and it turned out to be someone completely different, to whom I am a complete stranger.” In that sentence it fits and is natural, and rephrasing would be more effort than sticking with whom.
I wouldn’t say on accident because I’m not American. I have no judgment to make on it, it’s just not British English. It’s not something that’s crossed over here.
“Alright” is accepted in the style guide for my editing work (subtitles, UK). This is because it does have a different meaning to all right, like in your example - and it’s even said differently (in terms of stress). That’s why I dislike that everyday and every day are being used as synonyms. Different meaning, different stress.
Flaunt and flout are different words. Your third example would genuinely make me think John was holding the rules up to tell someone what they are, in a pass-agg office battle.