ThAn thAn thAaaaaan

[Thispupsgottofly]

I swear this didn't use to be such a common error, but I have read so many posts today where people say then when they mean than!
I guess it's because lots of people (including me) pronounce it 'thn'.
Eg. If you say you'd rather stay at home then go to the beach it sounds like you're going to do one after the other!
Aaaaargh!

YANBU.

People never read and apparently don't care about their spoken English.

There is a significant amount of poor grammar on MN. I’ve just read another thread where someone has said she is “losing the wheel to live.” (In fact I think she might even have said “loosing the wheel”). Someone else was talking about “rest bite care”.

Some of it is typos and autocorrect but generally many people spend their time reading texts and watching reels rather than reading.

And some people post the same thing four times!

Duplicate

And another

Or checking that their original post has full stops or parentheses in the correct place, adequate punctuation and that they have given their connection enough time to upload their response before refreshing and posting it multiple times?

I've just read yet another post in which the OP has written women instead of woman.

@Era I saw "loosing the wheel to live" as well 😂I don't understand what anyone thinks "rest bite" means. They're two separate words with their own definitions and putting them together makes no sense whatsoever. I get that it sounds a bit like respite but do people really not think about what they write?

I saw "wheel to live" too. I've also seen non when they mean none quite a few times which is a bit strange.

Should i mention the good old chesterdraws at this point 🧐

Another one creeping in is "his" instead of he's. I've seen it multiple times and it's baffling. It doesn't even sound similar.

Thank you OP. It's been irritating me for ages. This is very, very basic stuff.

I've seen it the other way around quite a lot, none instead of non. For example "it was a none starter".

P.S. I know this sort of thread has been done to death but I haven't seen anyone actually mention the then/than thing before.

Honestly i think a lot of this is because people don't read any more. Except text messages with bad grammar ...

If you only hear words and never see them written down you can get it very wrong.

"Been" instead of "being". I've seen this on file notes at work for close to ten years. It clearly doesn't make sense - just think about what you're writing, people.

This one is growing in popularity too. I'm seeing it so often.

Same thread she wrote litterally too

Oh and another thing - anyways!
It doesn't need an s!

My bugbear is all the myself/yourself stuff where good old me and you would do 😫

American. I have to let this one go 🤷🏻

Dear American people, take that s of 'anyways' and put it on the end of 'math'.

As soon as I see mistakes like this, I start making (unwarranted and unnecessary) judgements about the poster. I mean, anyone can make an autocorrect mistake or have a slip of the finger, but consistent grammatical mistakes just make me think that someone has never read a book or newspaper in their lives and relies on the internet for all their information.

I know, I know, I shouldn't think like this! And I do try not to, but...

Any minute now people will be along to list all the common errors that get mentioned all the time on these threads.

May be autocorrect - “that” autocorrects to “they” all the time for me on my phone - no idea why, presumably I type “they” more than “that”.

That would work 😃