To HATE it when people say "your" instead of "you're"

[Twitterqueen]

I realise this should probably be in pedants' corner but I am becoming more and more irritated at so many posters misusing the word 'your'. It's lazy, it doesn't make sense and it's just wrong.

And yes, I'm in a bad mood today.

"If your going to the shops can you buy x,y,z...." NO NO NO. The word is you're! The apostrophe denotes a missing letter and an abbreviation!
You a're.

The word 'your' is possessive. So you could say "If your chauffeur is going to the shops today..." or daughter, or son.

Rant over.

So, why are you sneering at people who make errors, then?

Surely, you might recognise they might have less education than you, or good reasons to struggle?

Why is that a shameful thing, or something that should let you poke fun at someone else?

FWIW, the things I noticed were that odd punctuation mish-mash with :-, and the grammar of the final sentence (or fragment). In isolation, you might say 'I thought he would know better', but you used 'was', which changes expectations of tense. I suspect what you meant was 'I would have thought he would have known better'.

I don't really see why any of this matters in the slightest, but if you are going to be rude about other people - especially when they might just be pronouncing something differently from you, and especially when it's something as minor and long-established as 'of' for 'have' - you are liable to attract criticisms for your own writing.

Cross post.

I'm so sorry you're scared. No doubt the poor people who occasionally say 'of' rather than 've' - like me - are paralysed with utter fear as a result of your earlier comments.

I always find myself split down the middle (figuratively not literally) when this subject comes up. On the one hand, I’m a natural pedant. I can’t help but notice these and similar errors and some in particular make me almost physically wince. I love language and words, and I hope we never lose the nuance and subtlety that we can express with a careful choice of the right word because of certain errors becoming accepted usage and replacing words that already exist with a specific.

On the other hand, I would never judge someone or correct their SPAG unless they’d asked me to or if there were errors on a page or document that was going to be or was being used in a professional context, especially if it were publicity material. Having a good command of SPAG doesn’t make you innately more intelligent than Person B who uses “would of” and “pacifically”, it just means you learned a skill that they didn’t – and indeed they may not have had the opportunity to do so. I can’t rewire a house, pluck and gut a chicken or work out square roots without a calculator but because they’re less visible or widespread skills, I don’t get judged for the lack of them in the same way as someone who misheard “chest of drawers” as “chester drawers” shortly before they posted their Ebay listing does.

Wow. I don't think I deserved that.

specific meaning.

I really couldn't have put it better myself, Page. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

It's a slippery slope that ends up at Chester draws before you know it.

I can't fucking breathe

Well, I'm now in tears, which is ridiculous when this is just an online forum, and I only need to hide the thread or stop posting for a while. BUT as I'm already severely depressed I think it makes sense for me to deregister, so I'm not tempted to post again and also so that I actually get on with the hobby I'm supposed to be doing instead of being online for bloody hours.

What a ludicrous overreaction you may think, and you'd be dead right

I have no doubt that Jeanne will be saying it serves me right as she believes I'm responsible for paralysing people with fear for mentioning what Matthew Wright said.
Apologies to all the people I have paralysed with fear and "sneered at" by posting about it.

Apologies for all the grammatical errors in my own posts too but at least there won't be any more.
Which is nice.

Am loving Muphry's Law being illustrated here on this thread.

Mwa ha ha.

Ah poo.

Grunt. X post, apologies.

It annoys me, because it makes it so hard to teach to a class of children, when they see it incorrectly everywhere!

With the greatest respect, Grunt, perhaps you do need to stop taking this all so personally. Besides, I felt that you were jumping down my throat, for simply asking what I felt was a perfectly reasonable question earlier, hence my "keep your hair on" retort. See how your own words can make someone else feel? Treat people as you'd like to be treated yourself and all that.

grunt, I am very sorry things are so tough for you at the moment.

I certainly don't think it 'serves you right'. But I do think you might show some empathy with the people you mocked.

I am going to find myself unwillingly listening like a fucking BAT to anyone says 'your/you're' to me for the next eternity, just to reassure myself that they are using the correct term(s).

Damn you op!!

I saw someone point out someone's terrible 'grammer' yesterday.

I don't think his Grandmother was amused.

TheSultan, 'wether' is a word - it's a castrated male sheep. So if you have a DC doing homophones you can get a bonus point for whether/wether/weather Although I think it is generally seen when people have spelt one of the others wrongly.

TheSultan, 'wether' is a word - it's a castrated male sheep. So if you have a DC doing homophones you can get a bonus point for whether/wether/weather Although I think it is generally seen when people have spelt one of the others wrongly.

I love "Remember your hippos" and the woman reading it thinking "cheeky cow!" :o

In fact *Remember your hippos" needs to be the title to the follow up of "eats shoots and leaves"

Goodness me....
some of the posts here have cheered me up, so thanks for that. Others make me cross again..

MeMyself
These threads are a great way to make those that have problems with spelling and grammar feel shite and for the op to feel so clever and superior.

It's not about feeling clever and superior at all. It's about laziness. This kind of basic grammar is taught in primary school and I don't believe there's any excuse for simple errors like your and you're (except maybe on phones - textspeak and autocorrect).

I agree with Skiptonlass. I work with a lot of people in different countries every day and they all speak English way, way better than most people I know. Because they've been taught it correctly.

And no, this isn't an English-teacher-bashing thread either. I was once one of those. I guess it is about laziness and sloppiness. And I'm appalled at some of the errors I see on CVs - I never interview people who can't spell (unless they are honest about a specific issue like dyslexia.

You missed your closing bracket there.

Bit sloppy.

Possibly lazy.

There are only two occasions where this bothers me.

1 - staff in a school who don't know the difference and write it incorrectly. I've seen hand-made certificates given to children that said 'your a star!'. Nope.

2 - where the OP is being a bit of a dick and having a go at people who may have struggled in education or have learning disabilities.

Oh, look...

Hunting misspelling and grammatical errors in Outrage At Poor Use of English threads has become my guilty pleasure.

Of course it's about feeling superior, you pretty much admitted that when you said/typed it's because other people are too lazy and sloppy to spell correctly.

You have decided every single person who doesn't meet your standards is lazy, nice.

There's no way my mum knows when to use your / you're or to / too etc. Her parents split when she was small and neither really wanted her. She was shunted between parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. She changed school almost every term and dropped out at 13. She can read OK but struggles to write, knows nothing about grammar. She can't do maths at all. Or maybe she's just lazy and sloppy.