So this has been annoying me for years now two other people in my year at high school and myself are the only ones who actually have a grasp on grammer. It drives me crazy! Here are the most common ones: (Wrong on the left, correct on the right.)

He won them - He BEAT them

They'll borrow it you - They'll LEND it to you

She'll learn it you - She'll TEACH it to you

Where do you's want to sit - Where do YOU want to sit (One freaking letter?!)

Those are the most annoying but there are many, MANY others. Is it so difficult to change one word. Just one. It will not kill your vocal cords or do your throat any harm. Seriously.

And then what really winds me up is when I correct them, and they try to argue back?! Genuinely believing they are right and I'm wrong! You're messing with a geek about grammer, how silly can you get?!

Oh and being 'Northern' is not an excuse. (I'm from England just to clear that up and I don't even know whether this is a regonal problem or whether it's actually a worldwide infection.)

Also, picking up a book and reading for leisure will not kill you.
But I'll save that for another time.

:angry:

EDIT: Gah! :o Can't believe I did that. >.> Missing out the 'to' was a typo, sorry I was typing too quickly and in a bit of a hurry because I had to get off. Bah...

D:

I know people who do this. I just kind of leave them alone because I think it's a cultural thing and they'll just get annoyed with me if I try to correct it. If I were their teacher, on the other hand, I'd let my red pen fly across their papers. *evil*

Is it an Brit thing to leave 'to' out of those sentences? 'They'll lend it TO you.' or 'She'll teach it TO you.' would be proper over here.

But I see what you mean, and it annoys me too. You know what I hate? People who say 'I need to itch it.' and stuff like that. Uhm, what? You have an itch. You need to SCRATCH the itch, to relieve yourself from it. The itch is what you feel, scratching is what you do to it!

EDIT: Wow, typos... >_>

No, not a Brit thing, I think 'to' was missed out accidentily? I have bad grammar if I'm honest but I have never read anything quite as bad as that... I know a few people who write things that just make me blink at them and stare like they have a green face and antenas. lol.

Haha, I'm a COMPLETE grammar Nazi, to the point where I actually can't read a magazine without making a mental note of every single grammar mistake. I'm constantly correcting my friends for saying something wrong - and while there are far, far too many mistakes to note here, there's just one that really bugs me right now.

"He self-harms himself."

Whaaa? How can you self-harm yourself? You can self-harm, and you can harm yourself, but you sure as hell can't do both in one sentence.

It sort of weakens your point when you can't seem to showcase your supposed superb sense of grammar - or spelling - in your rant about it. :/

You know, Munch has a point there....

I second Munch. Would it kill you to at least spell 'GRAMMAR' correctly before you jump down someone else's throat?

Agreed...

Personally, there are certain mistakes that really annoy me a lot, but for the most part, I'll leave it be, unless they're being an ass. Nobody's perfect, you know.

Also, I know quite a few people who speak English as a second language. Speaking with them has made me far more tolerant of simple mistakes.

The area i'm from, we always miss words out completely, so you would probably hate us XD

Like for example:

You: I'm going to the shop.
Us: I'm off to shop.

Yeah XD It's just something that was pointed out in college, because apparently not everyone does it, and didn't even realise i did XD But i do -__- So i cant really say i agree because i do it x__x

Personally, i don't see the harm :/

i'm northern. it isn't an excuse. that's how uneducated people in teh ghettos talk- it is NOT a cultural thing. it's a stupidity lazy thing. you can quote me on that too. ><;;

There's a difference between saying "you's" and mixing up the meanings of entire words, and misspelling a word or making a typo in your post.

I can't really understandwhere you're coming from, because no one does that where I live, but I don't blame you for being annoyed. I'd be so frustrated if everyone around me spoke like that >.<

Munch, Aeris and antisocialist87, please do not make personal comments. If you think an argument is weak or silly, just don't reply. Refraining from making personal comments - which both Munch and antisocialist87 made - is harder but makes life much easier for everyone.

I think it's acceptable to be more lax on grammar when it concerns speech. I agree with you on "won", "borrow" and "learn" as they were used incorrectly but I wouldn't have corrected "you's" (which is probably supposed to be "you guys". Some grammar rules get broken so often that it shouldn't matter. For example, it's considered bad form to begin a sentence with "and" but the majority of us still do it.

As I wrote in my first post that was a complete typing error because I was typing quicker than usual and I had my brother moaning down my ear at the time to come off the computer.

And I don't claim to have a perfect sense of grammar because when mistakes are made I usually let them slide completely, it's just those three that get on my nerves completely. (I use 'and' at the beginning of a sentence, as Roman pointed out, all the time which is bad grammar.)

I don't claim to be the most perfect speller either, but in my mind that's completely unrelated to the grammar mistakes I'm atually ranting about. That and I don't have a spell checker on my browser, and didn't have time to run my post through a seperate one.

I'm not particularly sure why I'm defending myself actually because I'm not trying to create a whole debate, I'm just ranting and letting off steam so I don't think I should have to be word-perfect.

On another note, yesterday my friends were having a conversation about borrowing something from someone (I wasn't particularly concentrating) and I tried to ignore the mistakes they were making with the word 'borrow' for a while but in the end I had to correct them just once. (I know! I gave in! >.<) My friend tried to argue back saying I was wrong and using the same excuse of being Northern... Gah!!! :angry:

Is it still considered bad form to do that? I'm not being facetious; I'm honestly curious. In elementary school and middle school I would get points taken off for starting any sentence with a conjunction, but in high school it wasn't that big of a deal unless it sounded awkward (like the sentence was a fragment), and in college it's not a big deal at all, and my professors are more grammar-oriented than my teachers were in high school. I always thought of it as formally bad grammar, but it can help stylistically or to help with the 'rhythm,' so to speak, of a piece. Kind of like how fragments are technically incorrect, but you can use them occasionally if the situation calls for it.

To be honest, I always hated the rule that you should never start a sentence with a conjunction. Some sentences need to start a conjunction, or else it sounds awkward, like you're just starting a whole new topic without any transition.

I sometimes speak in regional slang. "Wicked" for instance, is an adjective in its correct grammatical usage, but up here we've been using it as an adverb for ages. I also sometimes use "y'all" "ain't" "dun" and other colloquial terms. This doesn't mean I don't know the proper English, as I can speak properly in a professional setting. I just happen to sound like a hick when hanging out with my hick family.

I'm not so sure the original argument is about grammar as about vocabulary. Syntax seems to be the primary error in the examples provided – people using a word related to the one they mean, but which remains painfully and blatantly incorrect.

Have to say, though – if someone said "I'll borrow it to you" instead of "I'll lend it to you," I'd probably beat them with the nearest blunt object.

Grammar is often dropped during speech. Moreso than in the written word, and you'll notice even a difference here between what people write in their conversational voice and how they will write postee.

Yes. I say 'write postee' rather than 'write their posts'... but you got the point.

It can be frustrating though, and there are things that make me want to bash people over the head with something very heavy. Even ESLs (English as Second Language). I have a friend whose native language is Spanish, and always uses 'an' where he should use 'a' and vice versa.

Example from his current FB status: 'X is now an real hippie'

It burns my eyes, and kills my brain. Honest. Your/you're upsets me, there/they're/their makes me twitch... and I'm constantly pointing out misuse of the apostraphe. But I also manage to use the apostraphe to indicate the plural (which one never should!) too often to really complain about others doing it.

Mostly I sit back and shut up. XD Sometimes I can't help it.

"I have a friend whose native language is Spanish, and always uses 'an' where he should use 'a' and vice versa."

So many people I know do that and it bugs me so much because it's not a difficult thing to learn. There is no personal judgement required - you just check whether there's a vowel or not! >_<

My mother tells me off for ending sentences with a preposition. I find it almost impossible not to do that, because I have never been taught that it is a bad thing. The same thing goes for beginning sentences with a conjunction. It's just not taught in schools. In fact, my English teacher encourages us to begin sentences with conjunctions and to use sentence fragments.

I think it depends on the TA you get and whether or not you're an English major (I'm not). I've gotten away with the conjunction thing with the majority of my papers graded by TAs who were younger but my history professor corrected it -he's in his seventies- though without taking points off. It's pretty much accepted now from what I can gather along with the ending in preposition thing. I've always hated the rule myself as well and I break it constantly.

On another note, what are everyone's feelings on "can" vs. "may", "who" vs. "whom" (I always screw this one up) and "you and me" vs "you and I". I don't think they get corrected anymore either though they're more along the lines of actually being incorrect.

As far as the conjunction thing goes, I don't think it matters too much unless it's written down. It also depends on the context. ("And" seems to be a bigger problem than "but." For some reason "but" is more acceptable.)

And for "who" vs "whom," I've gotten a bit of a hassle at work when someone hands me a paper and tells me to give it to a coworker. "To whom?" I ask, and they laugh. It's all good natured, of course. :p

:sweat: My professor said it was okay to use "and, or, and because" at the beginning of a sentence but there are also requirements for being able to do that. Otherwise you end up with something relentlessly choppy.

My main issue in grammar is hugely long sentences with no pauses whatsoever and they don't give you a lot of time to breath and they keep using and instead of a period that would put me out of my misery because the sentence is finally over but it keeps going and going and going and just never seems to stop because they have to squeeze every single little detail and every little thing within the contents of one huge sentence so as I am reading I am beginning to wonder if this sentence will ever end because it never seems to stop and then just when I'm almost out of breath it just stops in the middle of what seems to be a breakthrough.

(You see what I mean? Hopefully you didn't read that entire thing. If you did then I am sorry you had to suffer through that. Believe me it was painful not to end it sooner.)

Another thing that seems to have bugged me more than usual are there/they're/their, here/hear, where/were.

Not to mention canon and cannon...

I apologize for any possible grammar mistakes, please don't eat me... x.x

I read the whole thing, Shade. But then I'm used to editing the work of my friends, who don't understand punctuation. And my brother. They can write entire paragraphs with no punctuation whatsoever. I find myself speeding up when I read super-long sentences, because I don't want to pause without the correct punctuation but I just want to get through the darn thing.

I like to use may quite a bit. Moreso when I am talking, I think. I don't use whom very often, because I'm not very familiar with the rules concerning it. My mother is always telling me to use 'you and me' or 'you and I' because I get them the wrong way around.

She's also constantly correcting me for saying 'here we go' instead of 'here we are' when I give people things xD

LOL, Emma. That's just silly. I say "here we go" all the time.

For the most part, when people speak in colloquialisms it doesn't get me that badly. I live in South Georgia, so I have to be pretty lenient about that or I'd go mad. It's when things like that bleed into writing...for example, it's irritating when someone says "I'll learn you this" (I personally think this is one of the most ignorant-sounding colloquialisms in existence - because if you don't know that "learn" isn't the right word, how are you supposed to teach anything?) but it's absolutely unacceptable when it's put into print unless it's someone speaking in a story.

No punctuation bothers me. A lot. It's like trying to read sand. Slips right through your ears and nothing retains.

It can be really annoying when people don't use punctuation in a really long sentence because, like Emma said, you tend to speed up and don't want to pause until you hit a comma or a period. I find people in top set English classes who don't use any punctuation in a whole paragraph or don't even use paragraphs at all and it turns into one big block of text.

I'm trying to condition myself into saying 'my friends and me' instead of 'me and my friends' because I know it's better grammar. But it's wierd because my parents, my Dad in particular, have really northern accents so I don't know where I get my interest in proper English from.

My friends and me were having a conversation today about grammar and I said to my friends. "Some of the time you have pretty bad grammar." To which one of my friends replied, before realising her mistake. "I ain't!" It was really funny but at least she realised she was wrong!