Your Grammar Sucks

The following are some words and phrases that I'm tired of seeing misspelled or misused. This list is far from complete, but it does target a few agitators of my GI tract, so I consider it a good start.

Perhaps the most agitating part of poor English, especially on the internet, is not just that people frequently screw it up, it's that they don't freaking care. Try to correct them and you will, at best, be met with eye rolling and ridicule. "Look at this guy, trying to correct spelling on the internet! Haw haw haw!" Well, what difference does it make where you commit your errors? Shouldn't you be in the habit of writing and speaking correctly regardless of the medium? Call me a skeptic (and I am), but I find it difficult to believe that these same people are completely capable of proper English only in specific contexts.

In any case, I'm tired of trying to psychoanalyze the motivations of people who are dumber than I am. Enough preamble. Let’s get down to business:

LOSER/LOOSER - If you read your horoscope or get high in your mom's basement, you are a "loser," not a "looser." The meaning of the latter is, of course, "more loose," and it’s an adjective.

ADVISE - VERB

ADVICE - NOUN

If you wish to respond to this blog, please advise me. Do not advice me. That would make you retarded.

ITS/IT’S - I count this violation among the most common. I’m now even seeing it in professionally produced media such as newspapers, instruction manuals, books, and other places it has no excuse for being. The word "it's" is a contraction. In case that word has too many syllables, I will explain that it's a shortening of the two words "it is," just as "don't" is an elision of "do not" and "they're" is short for "they are." I do not understand how this difference, explained to me around third grade, still manages to escape so many people. To some of us who know it properly, a sentence such as: "The crab, it's claws held high above it's head…" reads as: “The crab, it is claws held high above it is head…" Yeah, that’s right…pretty fucking annoying, isn’t it? When reading aloud, I always read the contraction in its full form on purpose so that all of its misapplications can be heard by others. I assure you, it annoys everyone else as well once it’s brought to their attention.

S/’S - Another excruciatingly common error. The apostrophe before the letter S indicates possession: "Those are Jerry's apples." Plurals and other words are indicated without an apostrophe. It's annoying to see a possessive lacking an apostrophe, but for some reason it's far worse for my nerves to see it added erroneously, e.g. "She look’s at the apple's in the basket's." AAARRRRGHHH! It's like shards of glass in my brain!

TOO/TWO/TO

Let’s just list these:

Too - only to be used in the context of "too much" and "also"

Two - The number that comes after ONE and before THREE

To - Used in every other context

SHOULD OF (Includes WOULD OF/COULD OF) - Where the fuck did this thing come from? If I ever find out, I'll fucking kick it to death Joe Pesci style. What is meant here, of course, is "should have," or its contraction "should've." Stop using this. Seriously.

WREAK HAVOC - Note the spelling. See it? See the spelling? Look at it again. Burn it into your brain cells, because it's easier to find a heterosexual Republican than it is to find a correct spelling of this phrase. I once followed an FAQ that was just full of this expression, always misspelled as "wreck havoc." I eventually had to stop reading it, and as such, I never finished the game. A small price to pay for my sanity.

ALRIGHT - Not even a word. Don’t use it.

TROPHIES - In the case of some words ending in Y, an -IES is substituted for the plural. It's not spelled “trophys” (and it’s certainly not “trophy’s).

THEN/THAN - If you were pronouncing the latter correctly, this error probably wouldn’t be a problem. So fix it.

MOST -EST - Who’s heard that song by System of a Down that deals with “the most loneliest day of my life?” Granted, you don’t need a hideous mistake like this to make System of a Down sound like drugged-out brainless freaks, but isn’t this bit of grammatical shitting-of-the-bed just a little too obvious? Didn’t someone at least tell them how stupid they sound? It’s not like they need that exact phrasing in order to make the song work…

Okay, back to relevance. The suffix “-est” denotes the superlative of the word it modifies. Not all words are allowed to use this. For example, I would say that System of a Down is the “most retarded” band I’ve ever heard, not the “retardedest.” Most words allow either alternative (i.e. “shallowest” and “most shallow”), but common sense should make it obvious that the use of both at the same time is grammatical redundancy. Certainly, the person who uses the phrase “most retardedest” has no right to use it in any context except when referring to him or herself.

Speaking of redundancy…

BUT/THOUGH – Both of these words mean the same thing, and just because they are properly used in different parts of a sentence does not mean it is appropriate to use both in the same sentence. You can't, because they both mean the same freaking thing. An example that immediately comes to mind is a line from the movie Independence Day: “No, he wasn’t his father…but I was kind of hoping he wanted the job though.” Great writing. Why not preface the sentence with HOWEVER for a triple redundancy rating, you hack?

LITERALLY - The meaning of this word seems lost on some, as it is often used as an emphatic. But it can only be so used when the situation calls for it in a literal context. I was in a class one day when a student arrived late. Wishing to expound on how hard she had tried to be on time, she began, “I literally flew downstairs-“

“Literally?” I interrupted.

“Well…no, not literally,” she admitted.

I am not a very well liked person.

There is a recurring skit on Mad TV in which two characters, after announcing impossible conditions, declare that they mean them “literally!” One only gets this skit if one understands the meaning of the word.

Y’ALL - I’m seeing this more and more, particularly in online gaming. The word “you” is most properly pluralized as “all of you.” I’ve even heard it used redundantly, in sentences such as “I’m gonna get medieval on all y’all.” Something this heinous is usually only perpetrated by “urban” speakers or southerners, both of whom routinely commit near genocidal crimes against the English language. I've even seen it misspelled! Yes, it's not uncommon to see this awful abortion of a word spelled "YA'LL." Icing on the shit cake.

K-9 – When referring to the drooling, leg-humping quadruped, the word is CANINE. This homophonic error is primarily used by police departments in referencing their police dog units, which is further evidence of how much education you can get away with not having in order to be a cop. Well sorry, but I will not have Latin be reduced to the level of 1337SPEAK.

ET CETERA - Latin, loosely translating to “and so on.” More and more I’m hearing this phrase mispronounced as “excedra,” as if it had some sort of relation to Excedrin “the headache medicine.” As a person who took four years of Latin, this drives me absolutely batshit.

HEY/HAY - The former is an exclamation, the latter is what horses eat.

LESS/FEWER - This can be a tricky one for some, so pay attention. Both words mean the same thing - the opposite of MORE - but you use them in different circumstances. The basic rule is that you use LESS with mass nouns and FEWER with count nouns. An easy way to tell the difference is to note whether the item being counted ends in the plural S. If it does, then "fewer" is used. In this way, you should be able to tell that it's correct to need "less fish" and "fewer fishes," but never "less fishes" and "fewer fish."

 

Correct

FUCKING FAIL

This naturally leads us to a problem with the opposing descriptors:

MUCH/MANY - In this case, the S plural utilizes MANY and mass nouns use MUCH. E.g. "too many bullets" verses "too much firepower." It's easy to see that "too many firepower" is wrong, but "too much bullets" is apparently still alive and well.

RECOGNIZE/SENTENCE/INTERESTING - A short note to remind people that there is a G in the first word, a T in the second, and a second E in the third. There are silent letters in some words, but these letters are there for a reason. Make sure you include them in your speech or, in addition to sounding drunk or stupid, you may begin spelling them as you say them, i.e. “reckonize,” “sennence,” and “intersting.” There are many such omissions (just yesterday I heard a kid ask for a "cheeseb'ger," possibly to go with his "carmul" candy), but if I focused on all of them, we'd be here all day.

Now I present a brief journal done by a marginally talented but dimwitted young artist. This is not the worst I've seen on the internet by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't want to overwhelm your senses. Please read it and see how many errors you can detect. I'm particularly bemused by her insistence on using spaces in between her punctuation.

"Ok I would like to say that , too the people waiting on ADULT commissions : I do not live by myself , sooo it takes longer to finish my adult stuff then it does my normal cute stuff , so it's not that I am not wanting to hurry and finished your commission , it's just I am hardly ever alone to do them!! ^ - ^;; but I am trying to get them done fast at night ,alright? at night thats when I am totaly alone to work .

Normal commissions: I actully don't have any normal picture commissions at the moment, those I get a few done sooner then the adult ones. so if your interested note me.

umm thats about all thats really all I have to say , and Trades yes !! Trades I am working on very much soo !! I should have a few done before the week is out . I'm gonna make Pin up's cause ..... umm I want too"

How many did you find? I came up with 47. Yes, there are 47 grammatical and spelling errors in these few lines of text. As long as there are people who write this way, then I will always have a slightly higher level of stress and rage than I already do. If someone one day finds me dead at my keyboard from a cerebral hemorrhage or gastric sepsis, please be aware that it was probably shitty internet grammar that did me in.