10 Grammar Mistakes That Make You Look Stupid

That’s a good list. A big e-mail annoyance for me is a blank or meaningless subject line, such as “FYI”, “Question”, or “Help!!!!!!” (I get that last one two or three times a week from different sources). When looking at an inbox with the subject lines of 25 unread messages, those are no use at all. Don’t get me started on multiple question marks or exclamation marks. You only need one, people!

I was also taught never to begin a sentence with “And”,”But” or “Or”, but I noticed you did. I see this a lot in newspapers and it never fails to awaken the anxiety of seeing all the red ink on my papers in English class.

Another Bonus Peeve:

When, oh when, did we lose the knack of possessional and plural tenses? Two signs in my general neighborhood for public consumption include:

“Tattoo’s” to advertise a tattoo parlor, but unless the guy behind the counter is named Tattoo and he owns the joint, I hardly think this is appropriate.

“Spa’s” I ask you–who’s Spa?

Point being, overnight it appears that the apostrophe has invaded where it does not belong, and it has become my number one pet peeve. So call me a grammar fascist, I guess, but it bothers me like nails on a chalkboard.

Thank you, thank you for providing this guide to those little grammar nuances that our text-happy society seems to have forgotten. I, too, had trouble remembering when i.e. and e.g. were used but now I can rest easy.

My least favorite is when people say “I could care less.” That means you care. It’s “I couldn’t care less.”
I know it doesn’t really fit with the rest of these examples as they are more formal, but I had to put it in there.

Also “ATM Machine” the “M” stands for “Machine,” there’s no reason to say both.

Two Aussie errors which I never encountered in the U.K. :

I ‘brought’ a new handbag (should be ‘bought’).

We ‘done’ that last week (should be we ‘did’ that last week).

These two in particular are grating on my nerves at the moment as my 8 year old has just started getting these wrong. Why aren’t such errors corrected at school; they certainly are at home?

Here’s a bit of meta-pedantry for you, to set the record straight.

None of these are actually grammar errors. All except 4, 7, 8 and possibly 1 and 9 are groups of (near) homophones; I imagine in each case the writer knows which of the homophones he means (else God help him, his grammar actually is mixed up), but just picked the wrong spelling. That said, they *do* make you look stupid, especially 10.

4 and 8 are usage errors (the grammar is perfectly fine). 9 is quite possibly an innocent typo (and 1 can be caused accidentally by leaning on the “o” key too long). As for 7, while I admit I was rather surprised to hear it said in “Metal Gear Solid”, I consider it a dialectal variation rather than error. As for “impact”: just because you say it isn’t doesn’t make it so – I agree that the usage you give is pompous at best, but it has other legitimate uses. And with regard to redundant “then”: sorry, but if you call that an error, it’s really overblown pedantry. Finally, “hit and/or miss” is an idiom, and they are never fully logical, so an attack on those grounds doesn’t really work.

Cross: Tenses are a feature of verbs, not of nouns. You’re thinking of the possessive clitic (admittedly a relatively arcane grammatical term) and plural number. And the “greengrocer’s apostrophe” (as it is called on the right side of the pond) is an error of punctuation rather than grammar.

Sanch: I’ve heard both of those errors in Britain. “Done” for “did” seems particularly common in South Wales for some reason.

I’ll just add that you are of course entitled to your pet peeves – where would we be without them? (Although I think “burning pet peeve” sounds like a urinary tract infection ;))

Question: Does anyone have a “rule of thumb” for the use of periods in acronyms, when and when not to use them? I was once told at a very young age that if the acronym is actually a word e.g. Unicef or NATO or
JPEG or AIDS, then periods are not included (they can technically be an initialism), otherwise acronyms like e.g., P.M or A.M. or O.P.P. where periods are used, but I guess that rule kind of goes out the window when i think of acronyms such as FBI or RCMP…. So can anyone explain when to use periods?

“A LOT” IS ALWAYS TWO WORDS. “alot” is not a word. My sister makes this mistake a lot and it’s incredibly annoying.

One that’s driving me insane lately is “could care less”. Should be “couldn’t care less”. As in – I couldn’t care less about your grammar as long as you avoid talking to me.

And, living in the South US, don’t even get me started on subject-verb disagreement. OMG!

I “hate” it when people use “quotation marks” for things that aren’t “quotes,” such as when they want to put “emphasis” on a “word.”

Oh, and there’s no such thing as a “prenump.” Prenup is short for prenuptial agreement. No m. Where did that come from? Prenup. Stop it.

Not to be picky, but on #4, i.e. means “in effect” (i.e. “that is”). You are correct, but I’m more correct =^)

By the way, I can’t stand the incorrect “would/could/should of.” It’s “would have or would’ve,” people!

Regardless, irregardless, not irregardless, etc. all mean the same thing.

Unsolved mysteries. If they were solved, they would not be mysteries.

Programming: if if = if then then = then else else = else

Any Steve Wright joke.

Something annoying that occurs to me is the tendency among East Texans (possibly among others) to merge the words “idea” and “ideal”. “Does anyone have any ideal what I’m talking about?”

Number five is incorrect.

While the word “Affect” is in the dictionary, it is a psychology term somewhat related to the word affection. Unless you are writing a psychological dissertation, you will use “effect” for both the verb and the noun in 99.9 percent of your writing. Your suggestion to use affect as a verb and effect as a noun is just a common American wives tale most likely found on Wikipedia.

Another commonly misspelled/mispronounced word is metrics. It’s amusing how many people say “matrix”.

With regard to 2,3 and 6, I was always taught to think of the apostrophe as a replacement for the missing letters in the phrase. Indeed the dictionary defines an apostrophe as a punctuation mark indicating the omission of letters. Therefore if there were no missing letters there was no apostrophe.

So in the examples given:

The laptop is overheating and it?s making that funny noise again. – ‘it’s’ is used here as a shortened form of ‘it is’ therefore the apostrophe replaces the ‘i’ in is.

Download the HTA, along with its readme file. – ‘its’ is not a shortened form of anything, therefore no apostrophe.

The techs have to check their cell phones at the door, and they?re not happy about it. – ‘they’re’ is used here as short for ‘they are’ therefore has an apostrophe.

You?re right about the changes. – ‘You’re’ used here as a shortened form of ‘you are’ therefore has an apostrophe.

I’ve always found this a useful guide to when to and when not to use apostrophe.

Thanks for the satisfying list of errors to avoid.

I concur (I hope that’s is right.) with Dave & Mary on the irritation of “Couldn’t care more”.

Thanks to Erick for giving me a way to figure out when I should be me.

I would like to add one more peeve. – The use/none use of spaces in sentences. – We have computers now that know exactly how much space to leave after punctuation. We no longer need the extra space, one will do. But please space after numbering a list. (E.g., 1. Number One – Not 1.Number One.)

Thanks for the space to vent and I hope you enjoy the beer.

Corona

This is an American/Brit thing but ‘insure/ensure’… Please, people, ‘ensure’ is a real word and is to be found in American dictionaries too. Please take the time to check it out.

Having English as my second language I noticed that native speakers couldn’t care less if they make these errors, whereas non-native speakers tend to pay close attention to grammar, probably out of fear of sounding stupid. Once I noticed that I stopped “learning” from natives. :)

This is by far the best resource I have found on the web for these types of mistakes:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

Yes – “moot” vs. “mute”. I can’t think of anything that I commonly hear that makes people sound more stupid than confusing the two of those. Good call.

Opps, I spelled cringe incorrectly in my previous post.I humbly beg forgiveness.

What about the improper use of imply and infer, e.g., “I imply from what you say that…”

Cross! Very cross!

I know it’s somewhat rare when written but it really chaps me when someone uses seen when saw is proper.

I seen him run in the latest marathon.

I can’t stand it when people use “them” instead of “those”. It kills me to hear someone saying, “Go over there and look at them boxes.” Either say “them” or name the items, but not both!
Another annoying thing I often hear is “we was”. NO, people! Either use “I was” or “we were”, and never “you was”.

I am supprised that nobody mentioned needlessly ending sentences with prepositions.

“Where is that at?”…”Where are you going to?”…”When will you have that done by?”

As Mr. Churchill so eloquently said, “This is the kind of impertinence up with which I shall not put.”

Next we will be dangling our participles; in public!

About the Bonus part, my pet peeve is and always will be ‘new and improved.’
How can it be new, therefore unpreceded and original, and improved, a better version of a previous concept?
WRONG!

Thank you! And as for you, grainne.X, yes, that’s what school is for; unfortunately, a huge majority of humans seemed to have ditched that semester.

It’s a very good article in my opinion as I turn off immediately when I come across lousy grammar in what would otherwise be a potent discourse on whatever….

Please note that #5 & #9 are inaccurate!!!
NOTE: Technically Impact CAN BE a verb!!! (DUH!!!)
See: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/impact
e.g.
“The ball impacted against the bat with a loud noise.”
“Increased demand will impact on sales.”

Also…, when starting a sentence with the word “IF”, using the word “then” is still allowed (i.e. it is NOT WRONG!), & it is merely a matter of personal preference if you drop the word “then” or not. Therefore it is NOT a mistake to use the word “then” in such context. Anyone who would nit-pick at the word “then”, when it is paired with the word “if”, will most assuredly “come off” as sounding like a snob to most people. Cheers! :-)

Dave,
it is “I could care less”. Caring less, especially all the way to “I could’nt care less”, would require effort.

All are good points, and I wonder about the quality of education having no effect, and the media having too much effect on grammar. Don’t get me started on ‘txt msg’ in a standard e-mail message or on some covering letters I’ve seen.
How about: “for all ‘intensive purposes’?”
Have you “ate?” (8 what…?)

I fondly recall an exercise we were required to do in grade school English; while not precisely grammar-related, it drove home the point: “Which witch threw the broom through the room where we were?”

Oh, and about my pet peeve, and somewhat off topic: “Rule of thumb”: stemming from the Middle Ages, at a time when the law allowed a husband to beat, without impunity, his chattels (wife, children or livestock) using a stick or rod no thicker than the circumference of his thumb. Anything thicker than that was considered going to extremes…

While no one’s perfect, I must admit that I have quite a few annoyances with bad grammar as well. I cannot stand it when people mix up then and than, overuse the word but or use em-dashes randomly or in place of semi-colons.

Some mistake, such as your first and second examples, are excusable as typos if you don’t have a payed editor or a word processor with grammar checking capabilities.

Anyway, you made many mistakes yourself in this article that made my eye twitch.

Examples:
- “… here’s the worst thing. It’s not …”
- “Bonus peeve”
- “It can’t be both, right? It either hits or it misses?”

My pet hate is the wrong use of quotes.

If its speech, its double quotes “Holy cow! The Best article is darn good” said Tom.

If its quoting something written, then single quotes
The leading article in The Times today said ‘…the economy is in dire straits…’

I know the dictionaries say both are valid, but if you use double quotes for text how do you distinguish between speech and textual quotes other than interpreting the context.

GRRRRR!!!!

One final gripe (slightly off topic) and I’ll leave it alone.

Australian sentence endings.

If you’re from down under and the tone of your voice rises towards the end of a statement, then all well and good and I bear you no ill will.

If you’re English, THEN DONT DO IT! YOU SOUND STUPID!

By doing this you turn every statement into a question seemingly seeking affirmation or approval. Are you so insecure and have such low confidence that you must seek my approval for everything you say?

@John M
61 and 62 I’ll give you that, we all have pet peeves. (Lets not think about that in a Harry Potter context!)

60, no. I work in corporate communications and its been a solid rule for many years to establish a clear distinction between quoted speech and quoted text.

Our house style doesn’t necessarily mean that its a rule of grammar, however, if you don’t distinguish between speech and text quotes in an article then you are placing an extra burden on the reader to make that distinction and clarity can be lost.

As a communicator, it is my responsibility to ensure that the meaning of what I write is clearly and simply conveyed to you the reader.

While many of these things can be annoying, I would venture to say that they don’t necessarily make one look stupid by using them (not all of them anyway). After learning a second language, I have come to appreciate the fact that it’s not so much the way that the language is presented so much as the communication that is reached. If I say “I could care less” when I really should have said “I couldn’t care less,” the main point that I don’t care about it is conveyed; whether or not it is correct should be irrelevent. Not to mention the fact that so many of these things are so commonly misused that many people (yes, even some educated ones) couldn’t tell you the difference, especially ones like 3 or 8. Try teaching an English class to a bunch of non-native learners, when they ask you a question of how x is different from y. There may be many times when you know what is correct or what sounds correct, but not know why. And sometimes what sounds correct, isn’t technically correct, but again, irrelevant. There are many times when I speak Chinese and I use a correct grammatical structure that natives think sounds incorrect because they have never actually been taught the fundamentals of their language, like many English speakers. And sometimes they speak, and I can find mistakes with their own word usage and sentence structure, though my Chinese is also not perfect.

The main point is: communication should ultimately be more important than correctness–a lesson that one learns, paradoxically, through the process of being more educated.

You want to know what DOES make you look stupid? Writing anything in l33tspeak (or AIM langauge, “lol”), overuse of exclamation points!!!!!!!, and wrITinG in MIxeD caPs. I see these most evident when people post replies to blogs, generally voicing ignorant opinions.

Regarding ‘hit and miss’ versus ‘hit or miss’:

The use of ‘hit and miss’ should imply variance in a series of trials or attempts. One might say “The results of our tests were hit and miss, and therefore no strong conclusion could be reached.”

‘Hit or miss’ should be used in a predictive way to describe a single result. “The results of your test could be hit or miss.” This is self-evident and only worth stating if the communicator is intending to amplify the sense of variability expected in the result.

Mistakes with these phrases are contextual or logical, rather than grammatical.

Other common mistakes:
—————————–

One often sees or hears the misuse of second person (you, your, yours) in place of third person (one) in a professional document. Of course, this is an error of style rather than an error of grammar.

—————————–

A grammatical error seen and heard frequently is the misuse of adjectives and adverbs to describe someone’s state.

NO: I feel badly today. (This means the speaker is bad at feeling today.)
YES: I feel bad today.

Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and equivalent phrases. Adjectives modify nouns, pronouns, and equivalent phrases.

—————————–

NO: “The postcard says ‘Wish you were here.’”
YES: “The postcard reads ‘Wish you were here.’”

Er, “grammar,” I meant. See?

*dammit*

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Jodi, 10 excellent hints.

11. except / accept

Hi,

You had a major grammatical mistake in your first sentence:

“These days, we tend to communicate via the keyboard as much as we do verbally.”

Verbal refers to both oral and written communications. What you meant, and should have written, was

“…we tend to communicate via the keyboard as much as we do orally.”

I figure people think the word oral sounds salacious so they don’t like to use it and that’s why almost everyone makes the mistake.

It makes one look stupid if one is writing a nit-picky blog about grammatical mistakes.

“Annoying Editor” might want to hit http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/verbal, incidentally. Meaning 3 and the usage note ftw.

Numbers 1 to 9 seem to be ordinary mistakes anyone in general and foreigners in particular could easily make. But I agree, they do make you look stupid, especially in things like a resume. Number 10 however is by far much more annoying and stupid. It doesn’t just make you look stupid, it makes you look like a mentally challenged, uneducated, very stupid 8 year old kid. I don’t understand why, but it really annoys the crap out of me.

Latest find: “You must of have missed game 5″ by a certain BigJon.
Double points I’d say.