Do members of your family say things that bring out the pedant in you?

[UnquietDad]

MIL always says "them [nouns]", and "what" where she means "that" or "which". It makes me almost homicidal.

"Them books what you bought the other day."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!

And DW - who in most other ways is a precise user of language and a bit of a stickler - allows herself to lapse when in the presence of her ungrammatical Northern family. So, for example, when talking about her sister, she will say "Me and Jane are going..." I can never stop myself saying "Jane and I".

And they all just look at me as if I have broken wind.

I'm so glad I found this thread! I'm a pedant from a family of pedants. DH and his family (who are Australian) say Haitch I have to bite my tongue.)

We have just moved to Australia and I actually went into my kids school and had it out with the teacher that the "haitch" he was teaching them was incorrect. I'm stuffed if I'm paying a ridiculous amount in school fees for them to come out saying "haitch"

My SIL and her kids say arksed for asked. I get far more angry than I should about it! Told DH and he (who doesn't say it) merely laughed and said he hasn't even noticed...

My brother always says "brought" when he means "bought". Aaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh you didn't bring it you bought FFS!

I also have a cousin who says "aren't" instead of not, she said the other day 'maybe I aren't so thick' I had to mumble 'maybe you are' under my breath.

You should all avoid going to Bristol: we have some "normal" phrases that would make your brains melt!

"Where's that too?"
"I've had an ideal"
and of course "Bis casn't swing a cat in yer"!

My personal favourite phrase was heard by my BiL as he witnessed a policeman arresting a man for drunk and disorderly:
Man's girlfriend: "You can't arrest 'e. 'E buys I's chips!"

We can only assuming she meant "Please don't arrest that man officer: he pays for my dinner."

If you don't want to read any more Bristolian then don't click here

oooh, I put Happy Birthday in speech marks, not any more though!!

Of course that should be "Where's that to?". Stupid predictive text!

Awwrrie?!

I think any of us who were old enough to have gone to grammar school (yes, I know there are still some left) get irritated when listening to people making grammatical mistakes.

I often make mistakes through laziness though or because I have simply forgotten some of the rules of grammar, in a society where the language has been dumbed down so much.

A friend told me that her son's school refuse to correct grammatical mistakes in his essays! Is that normal??

My boss (who thinks she is very clever indeed) constantly says "pacifically", instead of specifically. I really have to bite my tongue each time she does it.

Someone once corrected me, when I said "he drunk all his juice". She replied, "he drank all his juice". I've been very careful ever since not to make the same mistake and respected her for correcting me, as I often get it wrong..:)

My pet hate is the use of "sat", when "sitting" should be used.

For example: "I was sat on the bench"

Grrrrrrrrrrrr

Not a gripe with a family member but DP says that at work he always sees something at the end of the exams he runs: "assessment statii" meaning "assessment statuses". The person who programmed that exam thought that "statii" was a reasonable plural of "status" - presumably by analogy with "virii" - except that the actual plural of "virus" in English is "viruses"... "Statii" doesn't exist in Latin or in English!

That's ok AT1137, we all live and learn. Welcome to the fold!

The less/fewer thing really annoys me too. I notice that supermarkets which don't mind being thought of as poncy (Marks and Waitrose) use 'x items or fewer' whereas most others use less, no matter how many complaints they get. Some have now collapsed under the effort of working out the difference and are opting for 'basket only', which is such a cop out!

Bagged, your post reminds me of something I was wondering about, maybe other pedants could assist (I'm away from home in a family wilderness of non-dictonary owners, or at least not what I'd consider to be a proper dictonary)...I've always thought that 'alternative' was a choice between two mutually exclusive options, e.g. "If you don't eat your dinner, the alternative is to wear it!", but now I hear it around all over the place used without an original choice for it to be an alternative to and with numerous options, more or less as a synonym for choice or option, e.g. "Our menu offers many alternatives, such as beef, lamb, potatoes". I don't even think alternative can be pluralised, can it? Who's right here? Have I taken pedantry to levels of just being plain wrong (like the people who say "Phil spoke to you and I") or is it just a rule which is systematically ignored by all and sundry?

While I have the chance to vent, I'm also going to rant against people in my family who say "the hoi polloi" and people who pronounce the final 'y' as a separate syllable in words like yesterday. I don't care if nobody reads this, I feel better for getting it out!

Britney Spears and her fucking per-ogative.

Fink, yes that's the way I understand it, there can only ever be one alternative, by definition. Otherwise, there are options.

One that I'm guilty of, hopefully I always correct myself, is using singular ??? where I should use plural ??? (not sure what the word is)
For example in my last post, I could have written "there's many options"

I thought Bobby Brown was responsible for his Per-ogative?

Prince and his Con-tra-versy.

Thank goodness for Llcoolj and his Phenomenom.

Of course they look at you as if you have just broken wind. Correcting people in this context is just as rude and inconsiderate! You have hit on a sore point for me though. I had a spectacular accent/ dialect until I left home for uni and I wish I had been confident enough to stand up to people like you at the time and keep it!

I would notice all the mistakes mentioned here, but it is incredibly difficult to shake off a mistake you were brought up with, because that mistake is your first language and the correct version is the foreign language!

My English flatmates used to make loads of mistakes and I said nothing, but they used to rib me about my use of bring and take. Apparently I used it incorrectly. I can't even explain what they thought I was doing wrong.

Can you not bring something to a place. Can you only bring it home, but take it there?

I seperated with my husband over his use of et instead of ate/eaten. Fucker.

VS I would bring an item to and take it from. No idea if that's the "rule" - I didn't know that there were strict rules about bring and take!
It's a minefield!

"One does not do that sort of thing" (seems a bit OTT mock royal)x This one does all sorts of things.

There's a good explanation of the distinction between "bring" and "take" here. That was a particular bugbear of my father's.

SPB - that's another one that pisses me right off - there are options not choices as so many idiots round her ewould have it.
if you can choose one item from a list of 3, you have one choice but three options

aargh!

DH was not very well educated (i've seen his English schoolbooks from 1st year senior - he went to a non-selective school because he failed his 11+ - and they didn't even correct his spelling. i got very upset at that), and he says lay instead of lie and all manner of other terrible things.
i spend a lot of time interrupting his sentences to tell him the correct version (good job he loves me! )

and living down her efor so long, i catch myself pronuncing girl "gewl" and world "wewld"
uuuurrrgggghhgghh

The one that grates on my nerves is nothink or somethink - Simon Cowell always says it on X factor and BGT, watch out for it. Drives me mad. Thing is my northen family say it and I was brought up by them and obviously learnt to say it that way too but realised my mistake and changed, you can do it too people!!!

That's a good link. I get that. SOmebody asks you to bring them an appetiser and you say to your partner, I am taking an appetiser to host's house. Then when you arrive you can say I've brought the appetiser.

I think that's what I would have said anyway though!! not that I was asking people to bring me an appetiser when I was living in a rented house

I think the tricky thing is the situation they describe there where you are looking at it from the position of the other person -- so you say to the host "Can I bring anything?" even though from your own perspective you'd be taking it.

am currently embattled with dd who has started lapsing into our local (pron. "lurkal", locally) ungrammatical idiom: "I aren't", "I durnt nur", "nur mummy I durn't".

Given that there are only about 4 other people where we live (incl. dh & me) who don't/durn't talk like this I have to just hope, hope, hope that lots of radio 4 in the background will sort her out!

I wonder how much of it is part of a generalised trend towards the rejection of learning and scholarship in favour of the acquisition of qualifications: if you're learning because it's just good to know things you may care rather more about getting language "right". And it can't be doubted that an unfortunate side-effect of increasing accessibility in education has been a lack of critical or scholarly rigour, right down to the level of spelling and grammar.

and as supernanny says, that just isn't asseptable.