Two things people routinely get slightly wrong on Mumsnet that set your teeth on edge and which you would ban....

[CurlewKate]

Mine are "nickname" when you mean "shortening" and "double-barrelled" when you mean "hyphenated"

When the grammar police come out.

People have regional accents and write the way they speak day to day, quirks and all, get over it.

Thanks. I think it sounds sort of regional to me which I love ( but a bit wrong).

Rest bite instead of respite.

It doesn't even make any sense.

*as not from the UK

Haha. That one is a little bit funny Daddy Pig. Never heard of that one!

Anything and everything to do with landlord and tenant law. All the armchair lawyers pitch up and spout some nonsense they've heard which is totally incorrect and means the e actual correct advice gets lost

See also employment law: esp constructive dismissal and discrimination

Lawyers will give 30 mins of free legal advice.

BUT, I seem to have found a decidedly British use of the past tense, which I love but don't quite understand.

Examples : " I was just stood there shaking" : " He was sat there reading"
Too me these should be " I was just standing there shaking " and " He was sitting there reading".

It's not the past tense; it's the passive. The past tense would be "I stood" and "I sat". The passive is a verb's past participle plus the verb "to be". For example, "it was stood" or "it was sat". No one knows who performed the action.

The examples you give: "I was just standing there shaking" and "He was sitting there reading" are the past progressive. This is used when there are two actions and you want to signal which action started first. For example: "I was standing in the doorway when I heard the siren" and "He was reading a book when the doorbell rang".

Now that I've been pedantic I am sure that my own post is full of grammatical errors, which I shall blame on a lack of caffeine!

Absolutely, I HATE this! I'm a Brit but not all countries in Britain call school years the same thing, so I have no idea what age a "year 6" child would be. Just say their fucking age!!!!!

Lordy! You need to calm down a bit. Is it really that enraging? Specifying the school year rather than the child's age is pertinent in certain years. Year 6 is a good example as this is the year when a child typically finishes primary school (primary school is for ages 4/5 to 10/11) and moves on to a separate school for secondary. In England at least (I don't know about the rest of the UK) this involves most parents visiting and applying for six secondary schools and often the child sitting entrance tests for these schools (even in the so-called comprehensive system ) and then the long wait to find out which school has been allocated, with all the highs and lows that brings. The children are also put through a series of stressful end of school exams called SATS which are controversial and, again in England, pretty much dominate the class teaching throughout the whole of year 6.

If a poster wrote "my daughter, age 11" and something about school - loads of replies would be "is she in primary or secondary school?" because that changes a lot which is relevant about school life.

My own personal bugbear: people confusing empathy with sympathy.

Or calling themselves an 'empath', like they're a newly discovered race on Star Trek.

'Her and her husband thought'.
Surely its ' she, and her husband, thought.

I would prefer to say that using 'I was sat', 'he was stood', etc, are regional dialect speech variations that find their way into the written English that people use when they are not skilled or experienced in writing 'Standard English'.

Even if they do know how to do that they may not feel the need to do so in an informal medium like Mumsnet. Consider that a bunch of blue collar workers from Boston having a beer might say 'so don't I' where people of a different class or location might say 'neither do I'. They might use such expressions on an informal forum, even if it had been discouraged in grade school. They are not writing a college essay.

This 'sat/stood' thing is very common among working and lower middle class people in the West of England, especially Bristol, and there they also say 'I was laid down' for 'I was lying down', and when they do, pronounce 'laid' like 'led'.

Being snooty about dialect speech is a class marker in the UK that you mainly find among the socially anxious jumped-up (people that my mother-in-law calls 'thirty-bob millionaires').

Posters trying to get into the supercool pedantry gang but missing the mark.

Oh, no it doesn't! The expression "If you think that, you've got another think coming" means "think again", why would it mean "thing again"?

I'm sorry, @Oldnproud, I replied to your post above without having read the rest of the thread, which is something I object to others doing. My apologies.

About apostrophes and plurals, though. Way back in the old days, when I learnt grammar from "A First Aid to Grammar", I am sure we were taught that the apostrophe represented one or some missing letters in contractions. Therefore, we would write, for example, "the 1950's" or "photo's", where the apostrophe indicated the abbreviation of "Fifties" or "photographs". I was not educated in the USA and am nearly 70, so it could just be my failing memory, but it seems to me that the change to no apostrophes to indicate plurals in English English occurred during the Eighties.

"Home made" whatever on the what's for dinner threads.

Quite unique. You can’t have degrees of uniqueness; it is or it isn’t.

@wutheringkites I'm very keen to be in the supercool pedantry gang. What are the entry requirements?
I'm assuming an initiation ceremony involving throwing 'tomato's' at greengrocers, scoffing loudly at call centre staff who ask if there's anything they can 'do for yourself',
buying as many Chester draws on Facebook marketplace and immolation of oneself at the feet of those who say 'holibobs' and eat 'picky teas'

I see your "hubby" and raise you "hubster".

Personally I would say that's typography rather than grammar. If you have an awkward plural (usually the plural of a letter, a number, or an unusual abbreviation), you can use an apostrophe to assist your readers. For example:
Hawaii is spelt with two i's, she used six and's in one sentence. You use too many and's in your writing.

Thank you!

When and how did that change? I remember logging on after a bit of a MN break & seeing DD18, DS14 etc everywhere and immediately thinking wow there's a lot of very large families about at the moment!

DD18 always meant my 18th born daughter on MN 😕.

You are correct. Apostrophes we're used in that way. 'Open punctuation', which came in as more people became keyboard users, recommended lots of punctuation marks disappearing.

This 'sat/stood' thing is very common among working and lower middle class people in the West of England, especially Bristol, and there they also say 'I was laid down' for 'I was lying down', and when they do, pronounce 'laid' like 'led'.

Being snooty about dialect speech is a class marker in the UK that you mainly find among the socially anxious jumped-up (people that my mother-in-law calls 'thirty-bob millionaires').

It's certainly very common but I wouldn't call it dialect. Dialect seems to be the excuse for poor English on here. Dialect words and expressions add to the language rather than diminish it, but true dialect in England is declining whereas 'he was stood' etc is everywhere.

'Ee tooke me buffit and ah wor fair capped, the claht-'eead!' is dialect.
'I'm stood here' isn't.

Whether you use dialect,poor English or standard English, it is sometimes useful to at least also know the difference.

Just because you personally don't like a word doesn't make it wrong. Not a huge fan of hubster myself, but it's not an an incorrect use of the word. Ditto mama, spidery senses, itching teeth, holibobs, boobs.