Scream into the pillow of this thread and avoid scorn on others...

[tethersend]

Pedant's refuge: I have to get it out, but not on the threads themselves as I'll get ripped to shreds it's not polite. It's safe here.

Pier pressure

What gems have made your teeth itch in silent rage?

Strenght

Gawjus. Where has that come from? It's not that much shorter than the correct spelling.

all of the above and can I just say "loose" instead of "lose" AGAIN - I think I say it on every thread of this kind but I hope that one day it'll filter through by osmosis to all the other threads...

I do wish people would stop saying they were going to have a lay-in. Or that they were laying on the bed.

Eggs or bricks, I wonder? Messy bed, either way........

There was even some drippy pop song by an equally drippy singer where they were laying on a mountain or somesuch.

I have no choice but to loudly warble 'lying' over the top of the singer's crooning if, for some reason, I can't switch the radio off in time.

Oops. Please excuse my split infinitive.

From a status on Facebook - "Feels really shit, not nice wen you have to be at the beacon call to a newborn."

That sort of thing is so depressing, as it shows that the person in question (assuming they are not dyslexic*) has never read the expression written down. How badly-read do you have to be never to have seen the expression "beck and call" in a book, magazine or newspaper article?

• And I wonder how often people claim to be dyslexic when they are, in fact, just shit at spelling. (Fastens down flameproof hatch.)

Oh don't - I have at least one person on FB who is a slave to "txt spk an shortning evrythng" - I am tempted to hide them but am not sure if they would know I had hidden them, because I wouldn't want to upset them.

I'm trying to remember a classic I saw in the last couple of days - similar to "beacon call" in that the person had obviously only ever heard the phrase - will try to find it and put it here...

Mind you, reading and making connections doesn't always work first time - it was ages before I realised that 'awry' was pronounced a-righ, as opposed to awr-ry.

Thumbwitch - I remember doing some sort of test at school when I was about 10 or 11 where you had to read out a list of increasingly difficult words until you got to one you couldn't do. I stumbled when I got to 'sepulchre', and so had to stop there, but was very annoyed, because I knew what it meant and could have gone on, just hadn't ever knowingly heard it said, so didn't know how to pronounce it (oh dear, still bitter, 35 years later ).

I once had to correct something that talked about 'working with stalk, the margarine manufacturer' .

Also, I once bought a 'Bakers dozen rolls' from Tesco (their lack of apostrophe, not mine), expecting there to be 13, but there were 12 .

debortuary

Dear. God.

Weary instead of Wary. This seems to be rather prolific near me.

Glad it's not just me who gets at these things!

Tethersend - thank you for the intro to this thread.

waitingforbedtime - "definately" really winds me up. Whenever any of my mates email me with that, I reply and manage to get the word "definitely" into the response in the hope that they'll notice/understand that they are WRONG. Sadly, there has been no notable improvement so far.

And breathe...

would of / could of / should of (listened in grammar lessons)

I was SAT there OF a Saturday night.(what on EARTH does that mean?)

Basically / Literally

your / you're

their / there

ourselves instead of fucking us.
myself instead of fucking me.

Most definately extremely annoying .

Ooh...I shall be watching this thread...

My grammar is rubbish and I can't spell.....
BUT Nuc-u-lar, makes me want to press the big red button, and while I'm at it. Is Med eev-ial right? what' wrong with medieval. My head gets so scrambled.

A couple of mine have been mentioned:

"would of" is so illiterate that I tend to feel there is no hope for the writer and "loose" instead of "lose", likewise.

I get annoyed by the more subtly illiterate: my friend is frequently laid on the bed/the sofa (by whom? It sounds fascinating) when...

One which really makes my teeth itch is a sentence along the lines of "her and me went into town".

"defiantly" instead of "definitely" is another of those errors which seems to suggest the writer never reads and sees either of these words written down.

Are we allowed to mention those expressions which are peculiarly American? Two that I struggle to understand are:

"She could care less" meaning "she couldn't care less", surely?

and

"I got off of the train..." Why is the "of" needed?

No problem, KFW... I recognised a kindred spirit

Oooh, yes, Americanisms- oriented instead of orientated seems to have snuck in through the back door...

There's nothing wrong with a split infinitive!

To gratuitously rid the language of such an expressive form is criminal, I think. And all on the whim of some crusty Victorian academic who wanted to codify English to Latin grammar.

I shall continue to happily split as many infinitives as I see fit.

Which is a lot.

Oh. Another thing. I hate the convention (taught to my urchins) that it is wrong to begin a sentence with 'and'.

It isn't.

And that's all there is to it.

I read a newspaper interview with Rachel Stevens, who was quoted as saying "my legs literally turned to jelly". No they did not.

On MN I hate seeing thread titles about Grammer schools, or the wrong use of there/their/they're, your/ you're, would of, brought/ bought.

Or txt spk. Grrr.

I don't have a problem with Americanisms.

As long as they are used by Americans.

It amuses me to feign confusion when the Feral Urchin (11), refers to his favoured rap artiste; Jay Zee, until he wearily pronounces it Jay Zed.

Oh and I insist on calling '50 Cent' '27p', too.

Not read the whole thread so don't know if anyone's already mentioned this.

Seems to appear a lot on Freecycle requests:

greatful or greatfull

Winds me up every time.

Wish I had a large stack of dictionaries to post as an Offer.

Just thought of another one.

When I was pregnant with DS1, we went to some Parentcraft type classes. The midwife was talking about pain relief and said "you can have gas and air or Equinox as it's called". She called it Equinox about four times during the class.

Couldn't bring myself to point out to her that it was Entonox.

Rofl at 'Jay Zed' , and at 'Equinox'.

Both of mine know better than to say 'marshmellow' - it's a marshmallow .