To say its..

[PublicEnemyNumeroUno]

Swap not "swop"

It's= it is
Its = belonging to it ( like his= belonging to him and hers= belonging to her)
Lots of people confuse this one as an apostrophe followed by an s after a name ( e.g. Susan's ) denotes possession but apostrophes are not needed for the possessive pronouns.

but Fred where swap and swop are synonyms (same word different spelling), it's and its are homonyms i.e. they have very different meanings. Therefore, I don't see how one can ever replace the other.

while we've got the grammar police out, I'd like to add that it's definItely not definAtely. AND my most detested of all time: 1 womAn, 2 or more womEn!

Another one that grates on my nerves: must have NOT must of!!!

I didn't get my bold letters above

ziaren I do agree to a certain extent, but we do lose previous spelling of words - why not swappe if swop and swap are okay?

At some point a spelling drops completely out of usage so as to be considered incorrect. I'd say that applies to swop, unless you can turn up a decent corpus when I'll withdraw my objection!

Muphry's law.

Very good, Japanese

Ahh OK I would have never got "toot sweet" I thought somebody was meaning "sweet tooth" but getting confused.

Yes, I am a looser

Haha totally missed that Japanese very clever

ILoveRacnoss

I love that mug!! (I also like the Stress one)

My gripe?
Please can people use the word number not amount when discussing something countable?

So it's number of threads complaining about crappy Christmas presents, not amount of threads.

Ai thainkyoo

Er, I am not sure that any punctuation marks appear in thread titles. My Christmas UN was "SantasComing EarlyHisSackIsFull" and I am pretty sure I tried to put the ' in "Santa's" and it wouldn't let me. So on this basis, we should all leave the OP alone, ya vipers...

Shit, I really am spending too much time MN when I should be looking for my next career move ----

Ha there you go, no punctuation marks in titles!

Take that suckers!!

You can use punctuation marks in thread titles.

Not in usernames though.

Bah humbug

Ahh, never mind.

Never mind, it was worth a shot

I frickin love pedants who make glaring grammatical errors.

Epic mortification!!

Racnoss I need that mug.

Texted not text
Should have not should of
Woe is me not woh is me

At some point, someone is going to pile in and say they don't care about grammar, accuse us of feeling superior and tell us off.

I'm not mortified, I find it as amusing as everyone else!

I woz rong.

Oh and it's poo not pooh.

He's a bear.

I don't care about grammar, you're all awful, consider yourselves told off

koTinka

Grammar aside (and I'm really bad with apostrophes so I don't get involved with grammar threads usually) I'd like to share this little gem I came across on Failbook:

'it was like that right from the gecko'

Please tell me you understand what it should have been - it made me cry with laughter. Someone genuinely heard that phrase and thought that's what it was!

I also read these quotes from football pundits recently:

There's been a real pavlova about Beckham

and

It's a war of nutrition out there on the pitch.

I love things like that, but the gecko one is my current favourite.

Comma splicing really annoys me.

Sorry, late popping back.

Fred What I was objecting too with "toot sweet" was, not the phrase but, the phonetic spelling. It has been in common usage for many years but, when written, is still spelled tout suite as in French.
There are lots of words and phrases from other languages that enrich English but they are not, generally, written phonetically