Verbage [sic] - examples of increasingly common grammar mistakes I have noticed...

[auserna]

Has anyone noticed either of these two examples of bad writing which seem to be becoming increasingly common?

1. People demonstrating an incredibly short memory span, leading to verbs not being correctly conjugated to match their subject.

Example: My friend who has lots of clothes make frequent donations to charity.

2. People putting an unnecessary comma between the subject and the verb.

Example: The old man who lived near the farmhouse, was fond of going for a walk in the hills every morning.

I think they don’t learn properly in school and they don’t read.

Or they weren't taught properly.

I didn't really understand English grammar until I learnt German.

I suppose it’s possible that they weren’t taught properly but there other variables in modern life like the internet where no one seems to care about grammar and punctuation, and you’re not allowed to even gently correct someone. I keep reading on MN that “language evolves” and it’s supposed to be the reason/excuse but I don’t think French or German evolve?

Most of the evolution of French is the adoption of English words - ans the Academie Francaise works very hard against it! The French teach grammar really well, also.

I may be wrong, but I see the 'evolution' of language as the creation of words in order to describe new concepts/products, e.g. laptops, which didn't exist not so long ago.

The inability to make verbs agree with the subject and other common grammatical errors is more akin to destruction (from my pedantic point of view).

I would be surprised if they didn't, otherwise French speakers would still sound like Molière and German speakers like Goethe.

However "evolution" almost always seems to be synonymous with deterioration these days.

I started the thread as I've been shocked recently by how many examples I've seen of the points I mentioned.

Yep. You're right on both points.

Or people cite "regional" as an excuse for bad grammar. Someone on TV a while back was saying "I have went for..." (as in, I have chosen). Might be regional but it's still wrong!

I think there has always been a large portion of the population that couldn't write well but nowadays you're confronted with it because of the internet.

I recently read a lot of the letters that mothers left the babies they were leaving at the foundling museum. Really sad and moving and also quite hard to understand as the spelling and grammar was very bad. In those days unless you had an illiterate penfriend for some reason, your exposure to amateur writing would be pretty small. Whereas now (if you read a lot of internet fora) you'll be consuming masses of "normal" people's writing.

Yes; "dialect" (or, as DH Lawrence calls it, "the vernacular" always seems to be the excuse for things like "I was sat" or "I was stood" as well.

I was told that no-one ever says, "I was led" when they actually mean "I was lying", but I saw yet another example of this the other day. I guess in a sense it doesn't matter, inasmuch as you know what is intended, but it doesn't half jar to my ear.

The errors are so persistent on here that people become accustomed to them.

Or people cite "regional" as an excuse for bad grammar. I don't mind dialect but if it's grammatically wrong, then it's fine as dialect but still wrong grammatically.

I remember a time when I mentioned adult illiteracy to a teacher and she insisted that there was no adult illiteracy in the UK.

We weren't taught grammar in English lessons at secondary school. I studied other languages, and that helped.

The teaching standard to GCSE was poor. I remember having work marked but something was only marked as incorrect and no explanation given - granted, the teacher could only do so much, but I didn't learn from it.
An example was my using obsolete as a synonym for defunkt and it had a red X next to it. Maybe it wasn't the appropriate synonym in the context, but I'd used a thesaurus and maybe tried too hard. Something like that was probably marked X for many in the class, so surely a quick explanation of why something was wrong would have been helpful.

I could add more examples but it was the sort of teaching that destroys confidence and instils bad habits.

I changed schools at Year 9 and the teaching of languages improved enormously but English was still quite weak.
The other language classes were fun and vibrant but English was dull and slow.