Friend keeps correcting my grammar - irritating

[Satsuniml]

My friend and I met up this morning for a coffee and even though I do like her in general, there’s one thing I do find annoying about her and that’s her correcting me and people all the time. Earlier I said sometime like “and they were driving so quick” and she interjected with “QuickLY! Adverb remember!”. I just think it’s so silly as it’s only colloquial speech, does it matter? There was another one the other day in our group chat when someone put “your” and she responded with “*you’re” as it was the wrong one. If I see someone using the wrong grammar I couldn’t care less.

Would anyone else find this irritating?

I would never correct someone when speaking (unless it’s my husband or kids 😂), but in writing, it does matter more. I remember reading a post on here a while ago, and I was unable to follow it due to such poor grammar. I know not everyone can spell, but not using a single full stop in an entire post is baffling to me.

No shit, Sherlock.

I was amused at how quickly it escalated from a conversation about OP's friend to your irrelevant comment about the Queen.

Incidentally, I can't imagine the Queen ever called anyone a tit. Perhaps you should try not to be so rude in future lest someone assumes you are not one of the social "betters" you were discussing.

I would probably just go on making ever increasingly batshit grammatical mistakes.
Or shout "who called the grammar police?"
or get a siren and blast it (there is probably an app for that) every time.

And then drop her - she's a twat

It wasn’t irrelevant though.

Bless you.

I think you're going to need to go back and read it yet again in context, and you'll see that the queen comment was very much relevant to the conversation I and another poster were having at the time.

I'm more than happy to point out when someone's being a tit.

You're welcome.

I know what you mean, it's surprising to see these mistakes from a graduate. I'm often surprised by mistakes like the substitution of 'bare' for 'bear' in otherwise well written posts, too. Quite often I guess that the mistakes are down to dyslexia plus the dreaded autocorrect. However, people don't come on here to have their written work corrected and unless what they say is completely incomprehensible, I find it quite rude to comment.

Do you make this sort of comment about all the posters who criticise other posters for their relationships, childcare practices, housekeeping habits, hygiene, driving etc?

MN is so weird, the way it accepts all of that but goes ape at someone expressing discomfort at a badly written post.

Carry on doing it, I do and I'm a millennial.

Yeah pretty much, especially if they're trying to come across as superior to that poster.

I'm a bit ambivalent about this. I would always want to be told if I made a grammatical error, or mispronounced a word, because it's quite important to me that I should get it right. But I don't police other people's behaviour and I would not correct anyone else, unless they were my own underage child or it was my job to teach them, because I know a lot of people don't like it. I think I hold myself to a higher standard because it's something my parents were fussy about.

Isn’t that different though because someone posting about their eating or housekeeping habits on a forum like this , is in effect inviting comments? If someone posted about their writing style it would be fair to comment on that, but not otherwise.

Yup! It's an interesting evolution of grammar, I think - one of those new unwritten rules that a generation adopts to set themselves apart from their parents. My DCs would consider it rude to end a message with a full stop. They only do it pointedly when they're being sarcastic, e.g. "Is that so."

[am now agonising over whether the word "generation" should take a singular or plural verb in the sentence above - that's the problem with these threads! 😅]

Must say ‘quick’ instead of ‘quickly’ would irritate me, too, but I wouldn’t correct anyone except my own dcs, any more than I’d correct a colleague who was always saying e.g. ‘I rung her…’.

Talking of adverbs, after school tests at maybe 10, dd2 perversely pleased me enormously by saying, ‘English was OK, Mum, but I did really craply at maths.’ 😂

OP next time tell your friend to bore off. Would she do that in a conversation with her boss? No. She's being a twat.

I agree it is very irritating and she shouldn't do it to you. (I also cannot help noticing these mistakes instantly though, but I do manage to keep it to myself. They just make you squirm silently.) I have a friend who frequently tells me about things she's brought at the shops and I really have to work hard not to shout out it's BOUGHT! But that is my problem, I know.

Have you spoken to her, OP?

I have to admit that I hate when people don't use the correct grammar. Mostly because as a foreigner myself I'm likely to pick up on phrases other people say. I wouldn't have said anything but I would have thought "adverbs=ly most of the time" as that was what I was taught.

Personally I want people to tell me whenever I make a mistake in order to progress. But maybe that's because as a foreigner I think people will be less likely to judge me (or atleast not severely so 😉) ..

@zaxxon They should be using a question mark in that example.

I use full stops in WhatsApp, texts and social media posts in every sentence but the final one, without thinking about it.

I would think the same as your friend and find it jarring - physically. I wouldn't say anything though because I know in my case it is down to my autism and most people don't appreciate being told their grammar is bad. For me though, stuff like this actually feels almost painful because it is breaking the rules.

Absolutely agree with @dizzydizzydizzy, 'jarring' is the word - I, too, am autistic and find poorly constructed, badly enunciated, tortured and strangled spoken English almost painful. So much so that I almost want to rip my ears off,or put my hands over them, in order to not be subjected to it! Sadly poorly spoken or written English is endemic now, full of glottal stops, double negatives, dropped 'aitches', misuse of past tense verbs and every sentence peppered with 'fillers' such as "to be fair", "see what I mean?" and "like".

Tempting though it is, to correct it, I realise that social convention does not allow me to do so and just have to suffer in silence.

Tell her to ‘off fuck’

she’ll reply ‘fuck off!?’

you reply - precisely .

Me too!

I do care about SPAG but there’s a time and a place. Everyday chat is not that place and colloquial language can be witty, innovative and sharp in a way that perfect grammar is not.