Please Portray Your Pleasant Pedantry Presently

Ben

And always accept alliteration adroitly!

Split off from the Quality Man thread:

never_again said:

I remember the 15 min. discussion I had with a superior, who had a PhD in English, over the proper use of "effect" and "affect".  She was wrong, btw.

Oh, man, this one bugs me every time.  That and complement / compliment.  I once messaged a woman on OKC solely to compliment her on correctly using the word "complement."

Hopefully you were able to effect a change in her word usage and affect her knowledge to positive effect without making it look like an affectation.

JellyBean

Ben, you seem rather worked up about this.

There, they're, their.  It will be fine.

No need to be so shallow and pedantic.

Ben

^^^

Close.  Usually elements that "complement" contrast each other in some way that puts them both in a good light.  For example, a vagina may not look much like a penis, but it's a great complement to one.

Zoroaster

I'm about to have to have words with a systems engineer over the way he's used "perimeters" in a draft presentation when he should use "parameters."

Wish me luck. I'm going in!

Ben

^  The worst is when autocorrect tries to "helpfully" change a less-common word into a more-common one.  Fuck you, autocorrect, I know what I'm doing!

Husband3point0

A heathy cow is one that jogs. 

A healthful cow is one that's good for making nutritional cheeseburgers. 

Husband3point0

Mass versus countable nouns seem to be exceptionally difficult for so many people for reasons I just cannot understand. 

Less milk. Fewer eggs. 

I don't know why that's so hard, but it is. 

Ben

It has been shown that although vocabulary and the particular rules of grammar are learned, the basic ability to form thoughts into language is hard-coded into our brains.

Children speak English as though it were a language with consistently-enforced rules instead of a hodgepodge of Germanic and Romance influences.

RebuildingHusband

Oxford comma. Learn it, live it, love it. 

Ben

^^  Ellipses.  Fun fact: an ellipsis is always three dots.  When you see what appears to be an ellipsis with four dots, it's actually an ellipsis (three dots) followed by a period (a fourth dot) to end the sentence.  So… you use three dots within a sentence, but you use four dots to end the sentence….

 

It is actually its own character, which you can produce on most Windows machines by holding down the Alt key, typing 0 1 3 3, and releasing the Alt key.  Most folks won't bother, though (unless their autocorrect does it for them) and will just represent it by typing out three periods, which is perfectly acceptable as far as I'm concerned.  If you find yourself using it on Twitter, though, the keyboard shortcut might be handy since every character counts.

 

^  Agreed.

HildaCorners

Autocorrect should be fed a good breakfast and shot at dawn.

A friend of mine has demented auto correct software. She once told me of a young person she knew who was studying "gastro-physics". I decided not to ask for an explanation!

I'm peeved when chat-speak seeps into standard English. I don't mind the use of it for effect, but when I'm reading a client's letter and they use "u" instead of "you", I cringe.

Also cringe-worthy is the elimination of prepositions, as "I went the store" or "I ordered Amazon.com."

And then there's always the plural with apostrophe.

Note: I freely admit my posts are full of typos — despite ### years of keyboard use, I can't touch-type and don't always spot the typos before I post.

Ben

Chief_TC said:

RebuildingHusband said:

Oxford comma. Learn it, live it, love it. 

I usually just use a comma whenever I want the reader to pause for a second and the 3 dot thing when I want them to pause longer....

^That last dot is a period, thanks Ben.

When I want to pause longer, I think about baseball.

JellyBean

@BoneDaddyJive‌ would love this thread.

Sisyphus

Loose/Lose - enough said.

A particular pet peeve of mine is the use of words that don't exist:

Heighth (that's height with a "th" at the end).  This word is used most commonly by engineers.

Zoroaster

I don't, but I see where it comes from. Height, width, depth; it's understandable that someone accustomed to systematic uniformity would expect the "th" to be there.

Except, of course, that we're talking about English. Since when has English been systematic or uniform about ANYTHING?

Ben

Perhaps the worst of my pet peeves: incorrectly using the word "literally" as an all-purpose intensifier, especially in sentences where the exact opposite is true.  No, you did not "literally" explode from excitement, but you are literally making the English language a poorer one by gradually eroding the ability to denote when one is speaking the literal truth as opposed to speaking figuratively or exaggerating for effect.

_io

Different than instead of different from.

When I first entered the internet, I was so disturbed by the grammar, spelling and composition that I would literally (the real literally, not the fake literally) get nervous and jittery.  After all these years, I barely even notice it anymore.  I credit this intensive training for my ability to read fiction by authors who publish independently.

Tiger_Lily

And how do folks feel about using prepositions to end sentences with?

Tiger_Lily

A boy says to his father: "What did you bring this book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?"

Tiger_Lily

And here's a little something to brighten your collective day.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003780.html

Ben

^^  That is something up with which I will not put.

Actually, that's not true.  The rule about not ending sentences with prepositions is part of a linguistic fad in the 17th and 18th centuries to attempt to impose the rules of Latin grammar on the English language, even when doing so is awkward, arbitrary, and pointless.  Same deal with the rule about not splitting infinitives; you should feel free to boldly split infinitives that no one has split before.