Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts

[andyg666]

anyone who's read infinite jest will get that subject... for the rest of you. let me offer some remedial grammar lessons...

your = posessive pronoun. you own it. it's yours. (sorry for using it's before we got to it).

you're = contraction. you are. you're sure it's yours.

its = posessive pronoun. it's so ugly that its own mother wouldn't kiss it

it's = contraction. it is. it's a shame so many people use the wrong form of the word you.

there = preposition. it's over there.

their = possesive pronoun. that thing over there belongs to them. it's theirs.

they're = contraction. they are. they're sure that that thing over there is theirs.

if anyone else can think of some other oft abused and misused words, please post them here. you've all been warned. i will be killing anyone who messes this up from this point forward.

:ar15:

[ubertar]

How about to/too/two? I always see people using 'to' when they mean 'too' and for some reason it bugs me.

[andyg666]

nice one, can't believe i forgot it!

to = preposition. i'm going to the store.

too = adverb. also. i'm going to the store too.

two = number. two of us are going to the store. do you want to come too?

[awolski]

lose / loose. I just noticed this in the last year or so, people saying "loosing" to mean "not winning".

[llmonty]

i am guilty of 'whole nother' - how the heck did that n get into our vocabularies?

[andyg666]

another gets shortened to nother. a whole nuther to imply it's not just something else, it's totally something else. slang is totally acceptable and will not result in instant death. however, misuse of proper english grammar in non-slang situations will not be tolerated. you are all warned yet again.

don't let this happen to you... :ar15:

[JGriffin]

Thank you, Andy, for posting this. It's really depressing and annoying to slog through post after post of bad spelling and worse grammar.

[andrew embassy]

i am guilty of 'whole nother' - how the heck did that n get into our vocabularies?

Nother is actually in the dictionary, isn't that weird? It feels so natural to say, but you look at it and your like wha...


*ducks *

[andyg666]

noth?er Audio pronunciation of "nother" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nthr)
adj. Informal

Other. Usually used in the phrase a whole nother, as in the sentence "That's a whole nother story."

[djimbe]

you look at it and your like wha...

C'mon, you did that on purpose.

We were told in supervisor training that you had to look beyond the errors when reading the Millwright's reports. If you got the idea from what was written, that was enough. Of course, I wasn't dumb enough to try correcting the usage of some guy that was keeping the mill running on midnights, either.

I've been looking for a job and have been freightened by the sorry state of some of the correspondence I've gotten from executive recruiters. It's hard to trust your professional career development to someone who can't write correctly...

[JASIII]

Taut=tight

not taunt as many people say

[inverseroom]

Allow me to be Mister Difficult here and offer that, on internet message boards, I actually LIKE people's grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Written correspondence of any kind is inevitably limiting, insofar as divining someone's personality is concerned; in an informal context like this, a poster's mistakes are part of what defines his/her onscreen self. I am really very forgiving of writing errors in this context.

PLUS, I'll add that there's nothing that boils my blood more than some pedantic copyeditor who forces me to have to mark STET on the comma splice I intentionally put into a manuscript for effect, or adds commas after every introductory prepositional phrase, or circles in red every single tactical sentence fragment. Punctuation and grammar are elements of expression, just like word choice--there is emotional content in every "error."

That said, I can't stand "alright."

[ubertar]

Robert C. McGill wrote:

The other day my wife was composing an email message and used the word "alright." The spell checker flagged it and she asked me why. I told her (because it was what I had learned in high school forty years ago) that it is wrong; that she should use "all right." Since then, I looked it up in a dictionary and discovered that "alright" is...all right. When did this happen? Was my teacher (gasp!) wrong? And what about my spell checker? Enlighten me, please.

The spelling of all right--or more appropriately the spelling of alright, since the former is never questioned--is one of the Great Usage Debates of recent times.

Forms like all right, in whatever spelling, were around in the Middle English period, and then died out for no obvious reason. They reappeared in the early eighteenth century; it is uncertain whether all right was a re-coinage, or whether we just have no written evidence for four hundred years.

In modern times, the form alright is first found in the 1890s. Presumably, it was created and/or popularized based on analogy with such words as already and altogether. These spellings, though, had been long established by that time, while alright, being newer, could be criticized. And criticized it was, from the early 1900s onwards.

Usage writers and copy editors (and schoolteachers) tend to really, really hate alright. Some of the comments one can collect from them are "horrendous," "ignorant," "illiterate," "over my dead body," "lazy," and the like. This hostility has not changed much in recent years, despite the ever-increasng frequency of the form.

It has always been true that the form alright has been more common in non-formal contexts. But it has also been used for the better part of the century by undoubtedly notable writers. Theodore Dreiser used it through the manuscript for The "Genius", though H.L. Mencken made him change it to all right. Other alright users include James Joyce in Ulysses, Flannery O'Connor, Mordecai Richler, Langston Hughes, and Gertrude Stein.

While in general, alright can be found in all the senses of all right, in practice there can be a real semantic distinction between the two, because the two word form all right can mean 'all correct' or something like that, while alright can only mean 'good; safe; healthy', etc. when used as an adjective. (Similar distinctions are found with already and all ready, though these forms have diverged to the point where they are not interchangable at all.) Thus the sentence "The Kids Aren't All Right" can mean 'not all the kids are right', or 'some of the kids are wrong', while "The Kids Aren't Alright" can only mean 'the kids are not OK'.

This sentence is not theoretical; it appeared as the cover line in New York magazine in 1995, which occasioned such an outburst of criticism that the magazine felt obliged to run an explanation several issues later. Their main points were that alright was a clear allusion to the song "The Kids Are Alright," by The Who, and the clarity issue mentioned above. Their explanation probably did little to satisfy the many outraged English teachers who called their offices.

The current status of alright is hard to assess. It is very common even in edited writing--some studies have suggested that it is more common, which seems unlikely. Many people and many periodicals use it regularly. Yet it is still loudly condemned (your spell checker, like most, is designed to reject anything that's even slightly problematic). Depending on your linguistic philosophy, it is either an outright error that is distressingly widespread, or a perfectly standard usage that is unnecessarily condemned.

It's alright with me.

[andyg666]

Nother is actually in the dictionary, isn't that weird? It feels so natural to say, but you look at it and your (sic) like wha...

my like wha is what? i didn't know i had a like wha...

well guess wha???

:ar15: <img src="http://www.termite.com/images/phone2-animated.gif">

BLAM YOU'RE DEAD! A'IGHT?!?! (proper acceptable slang for alright or all right)

[Katapult]

How about then vs. than? I know the difference myself, but to give the english teacher explanation is beyond me.