Grammar and language issues that drive you utterly berserk - Pet peeves

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"Equally as." I don't care if some autistic grammarian can cite some obscure reason it's technically excusable. It's redundant, and saying it makes you sound like a teenage girl whose brain has been melted by Twitter.

Also people using "lead" as the past tense of "to lead" instead of "led." I think I see "lead" used incorrectly more than I see "led" used correctly these days.
 
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Lol last week I got a comment in a meeting to go over some doc: "Dorothy, you're always good at calling out the punctuation and wording things!"

The shade! I laughed.

Haters are mad because I make them fix things:jaceknife:


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I hate "a myriad of_______" rather than "myriad _______." I've investigated and have to concede it is not considered wrong*. :( So this has to go into the category of irrational personal nits. But it does bug the shit out of me.

* from Merriam-Webster: "Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it." *sigh*
 
Adjective+ness for something there's already a noun for. "Gratefulness" is gratitude, "warmness" is warmth, "coldness" is cold, "faithfulness" is faith or loyalty, those are examples I've seen in the last month alone. I excuse kids and as-a-second-language speakers for putting together sentenced the best they can, but "gratefulness" was from, if I remember right, someone on a podcast talking about their new book.

I don't usually care much about spelling mistakes because of my low respect for English and Anglos, but it's depressing when mistakes reveal how little someone reads books, or how much of what they read is poorly written social media. But it's interesting to me because somehow the meaning is delivered anyway. I wonder if there's any research into that yet.
 
Adjective+ness for something there's already a noun for. "Gratefulness" is gratitude, "warmness" is warmth, "coldness" is cold, "faithfulness" is faith or loyalty, those are examples I've seen in the last month alone. I excuse kids and as-a-second-language speakers for putting together sentenced the best they can, but "gratefulness" was from, if I remember right, someone on a podcast talking about their new book.
I kind of agree. But personally I can see "warmness" and "coldness" being used informally of a person i.e. "having a warm/cold demeanor." Although you could also use "warmth" and "callosity/hardheartedness" to mean the same thing, so yeah.
 
I kind of agree. But personally I can see "warmness" and "coldness" being used informally of a person i.e. "having a warm/cold demeanor." Although you could also use "warmth" and "callosity/hardheartedness" to mean the same thing, so yeah.
You can say "warmth" and "cold" about a person. To my ears, "coldness" is acceptable, I guess, but "warmness" will always make me do chudface. "Hotness" to refer to a physically attractive person is somehow better than "heat" but for spicy food, or actually high-temperature things, I can't stand it.

This is all just my personal opinion about these nouns, none of this is really that wrong and languages are always in flux or whatever.
 
Adjective+ness for something there's already a noun for. "Gratefulness" is gratitude, "warmness" is warmth, "coldness" is cold, "faithfulness" is faith or loyalty, those are examples I've seen in the last month alone. I excuse kids and as-a-second-language speakers for putting together sentenced the best they can, but "gratefulness" was from, if I remember right, someone on a podcast talking about their new book.
The most recent of those has been around since the 16th Century, but most of them go all the way back to Middle English at least.
 
People should learn the difference between "is" and "are." You would use "is" for singular nouns and terms.

Ex. He is leaving. An iPhone is a type of smartphone.

"Are" is used for plural nouns and terms. Actually, the pronoun "you" is an exception for that.

Ex: We are leaving. How many Xboxes are in stock? You are crazy.
 
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