To say it's QUEUE, not QUE?

[ImWearingReallyJudgyPants]

Every time I see "que" on here, all I can think about is Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

It's a sodding QUEUE.

Language evolves.

Absolutely. I remember studying Chaucer foe English Lit at school - it was so difficult to translate from English into English. He would probably be horrified at how the language has "slipped"

Seneca it's braaivleis or braii for some of us.

I'm not so sure, SoupDragon - we look back on classic and ancient writers and forget that they were the innovators of their time. There would be so much in our current language that would be new and exciting for someone from a previous age.

We tend to hark back to a time slightly before our own as a halcyon age of civilised speech and education, and forget that that time was just another stage in the development of the language, and that it contained its own examples of slippage, slang and errors, and that the middle-aged people of that generation duly harked back to the previous age. It was quite literally ever thus.

My current bugbear is "draws" for drawers.

A mistake that rhotic speakers tend to avoid as we pronounce that final “r.”

Your 'correct' English now is merely a stage in the constant slide.

So true. How many people on this thread are careful to use "whom" correctly? Very few is my guess, especially in day to day speech. It is fast biting the dust.

@lazylinguist

We tend to hark back to a time slightly before our own as a halcyon age of civilised speech and education, and forget that that time was just another stage in the development of the language, and that it contained its own examples of slippage, slang and errors, and that the middle-aged people of that generation duly harked back to the previous age. It was quite literally ever thus.

I accept that language evolves but that does not excuse 'should of' which has no basis at all in grammar, misspellings which lose the original roots of the word or using the wrong word and replacing it with a homophone.

@SenecaFallsRedux

My current bugbear is "draws" for drawers.

A mistake that rhotic speakers tend to avoid as we pronounce that final “r.”

Your 'correct' English now is merely a stage in the constant slide.

So true. How many people on this thread are careful to use "whom" correctly? Very few is my guess, especially in day to day speech. It is fast biting the dust.

As is splitting the infinitive.

I accept that language evolves but that does not excuse 'should of' which has no basis at all in grammar, misspellings which lose the original roots of the word or using the wrong word and replacing it with a homophone.

Precisely.

Yes, but which mistakes you happen to find excusable or inexcusable has no bearing on how often they are made or whether or not they eventually become an accepted version or the norm.

There are mistakes which I find a bit irritating, but honestly, trying to separate mistakes into excusable or inexcusable, or getting cross about the state of the language are futile pursuits.

Futile is the operative word. 🙄

I find all this a bit worrying- I probably err on the pedantic side of things and most of these mistakes make my teeth itch, but I have somehow managed to produce a dyslexic child who considers both reading and writing an exquisite form of torture. He will both write and say 'I done' 'Could of' etc and there's only so much nagging you can do without upsetting him. I just have itchy teeth a lot

As is splitting the infinitive.
There is absolutely no reason not to split infinitives. It is a silly hangover from a time when people tried to model English grammar on Latin. I am quite happy to unceremoniously split an infinitive.

At the beginning of lockdown a new local FB group was created called the Tesco Queue Status. It was designed so that people could update the locals on how many people were waiting outside in the queue. Literally, this was the only topic of conversation, most posts stated 4 people in the queue currently, 6 people in the queue etc. The amount of people that would then put there's no cue at the moment, or Que is 10 people really astounded me..