Thursday, February 09, 2012

Grammar Curmudeons

Had a student ask yesterday about grammatical pet peeves.  His was "irregardless."  My big three are:

1)  "Quote" used for "quotation."  Quote is a verb.  You quote someone.  What you write down is not a quote, but a quotation.  " are quotation marks, not quotes.

2)   The death of the adverb.  It seems the only times we hear "ly" these days is Bruce Lee and broccoli.  the adjectival forms are used as adverbs.  Come on people, did you never play MadLibs?

 3)  Less/fewer.  Even on NPR, I'm hearing less used for discrete objects.  You can have less butter, but you get fewer eggs.

What grammatical errors make you want to dangle your participle in public?