There are so many stories which contain the word 'form' instead of 'from', has anybody noticed?
It drives me carzy or is that crazy!
LoL
Rita
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They could just...
be typos not picked up by the spell checker because technically they're not misspellings. Another that drives me up the wall is some writers inability to differentiate between then and than, something which appears to occur mostly in the Americas.
Angharad
Angharad
Dialects
Some American accents blur the difference between the sounds of the two words. Unfortunately, they are some of the larger accent groups. Like 70% of the population. :)
One thing that always stops me when reading UK writers is the use of "whilst". Why did this word get resurrected? You never run into it in early 20th century British writing but today it's all over the place. It sounds like an affectation. :)
If you really want to have a laugh at how American English sounds to other people: Italian Variety Show channeling Sid Caesar.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
sid caesar
excellent!
Age is an issue of mind over matter.
If you don't mind, it doesn't matter!
(Mark Twain)
LoL
Rita
Metajokes
There are several subtle metajokes worked in. The dancers repeatedly do a cowboy strut and the guy is part of the time dressed as Chico Marx, a Jewish American whose stage character was a poor Italian immigrant talking in doubletalk Italian. :) The music has some Aaron Copeland horn flourishes. Other things. It's really a masterpiece! I've watched it a dozen times. It's a good music video even without the humor. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Kewell!
Love that music. I never knew we were so funky!
To me the ultimate American accent was always Peter Sellers
doing President Murfley Mufflidge in Dr. Strangelove...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAeqVGP-GPM
I would have loved to hear his Major Kong but he swore off
of playing 4 roles after he hurt his back falling off his bomb...
~~~hugs, Laika
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
Affected ... Now I Know !
So, all this time, I thought I was somehow channeling my ancestors, but actually I am just suffering from affectation!
Right, got it. :)
Khadijah
Prescriptivism
>> "whilst"
>> It sounds like an affectation.
Language is flexible, especially English. One can "resurrect" bits of language, or even invent bits, as it suits one's personal fancy. A perfectly reasonable writer of American English might, during the course of a bit of writing, set down: "Oui, monsieur," and be perfectly correct, unless that writer *meant* to say: "We missed!"
The American Heritage Style Guide likes "whilst" well enough, and notes that it can add a certain air of literariness, humourous irony, or je ne sais quoi, to a perfectly proper bit of American writing. The more boring the style guide, the less it likes it, including (surprisingly enough) The Guardian Style Guide (from the UK and all) which quite often apes Americanisms more or less by preference, a habit which annoys at least some UK residents, who are thereby distinctly unamused.
The reason many Americans "mistake" then for than is that the two words sound the same in many dialects, and are pronounced more or less like the imaginary word "thuhn." In these dialects, careful enunciation of the two distinct vowels may even be seen as an "affectation."
than |ðan| |ð(ə)n|
then |ðɛn|
A hundred years from now, at least some English speakers may be spelling them the same, and think of them as alternative meanings of the same word. Stranger things have happened.
In the dialect I grew up with, everyone pronounced the "L" in "palm tree," yet now there are a lot of "ignoramuses" who think it rhymes with Pom. Go figure.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Since we're talking errors...
I've seen a limited number of authors who've had problems with homonyms - words that are either spelled or sound similar to the intended word, e.g. 'cloths' instead of 'clothes', 'stares' instead of 'stairs'. Unfortunately, some of these have escaped detection after editing. I have to stress this is a very limited number of authors - most are very good at saying what they mean (I hope that also applies to the dozen or so random ramblings I've posted...)!
However, the one error that really bugs me is when a block of speech omits either the starting or ending quotation mark. I still enjoy the story, but it's annoying to have to backtrack along the sentence to work out where the character's speech actually started or ended. Obviously different people follow different stylistic rules when it comes to laying out text in their stories, but I personally find the "new speaker, new line" rule can be very useful: when a new character starts speaking, start their speech on the next line. The technique also adds visual space, which makes it even clearer to see who's saying what, when.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Errors....
"Your going to be sorry"
"You're car has broken down"
"Its lost it's way"
"Who's is it?"
etc...........
Blocking speech
The correct usage, as I was taught, in blocking an extended speech or quotation, is always to use opening quote marks at the beginning of each paragraph, but only to use closing quote marks once at the end of the entire speech or quotation.
A practice that I see too much at BCTS that has been confusing is to surround each paragraph in an extended speech with both opening & closing quote marks. This is bad, because it gives the false appearance of dialogue when there's only one speaker.
To be fair, this is not only a problem at BCTS, but also one that I've seen all across the Internet.
I have an unconfirmed (& perhaps unprovable) suspicion that a reason for this confusion is that many authors writing on the Internet try to apply the same logic that applies to parentheses, brackets & braces in the various programming languages. But the usage of quotations in writing follows entirely different rules of logic.
The Rev. Anam Chara+
Anam Chara
I try to do that too
Although as a general rule, I'm learning to break up my dialog so I don't have massive blocks of speech, there are times where it's just unavoidable, so I follow the above and use a new open quote for a new line from the same speaker, though if it's an ongoing conversation it's closed-quotes every time, whether or not it's marked with a he said/she said.
I try to mark changes in speaker from time to time though just because writing dialog for four girls all involved in the same conversation can get confusing, quickly. ;-)
Quotation marks
The "correct" use of quotation marks varies by country, as do the marks themselves.
Quotation marks
Non-English Quotation Marks
Some people leave off the "closing" quote mark when a quote spans two paragraphs, some don't, because this can become confusing, requiring one to keep track of the *absence* of a tiny mark to make sense out of a run of text. Easier, and usually more clear, is to add a bit of visual business to explain the pause between the paragraphs to begin with.
Alternative:
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Ooooo, I love it!
What a delight to see a discussion of grammar and usage.
But, Puddin', your alternative suggestion could be made better and more clear. Here is my suggestion:
or
There is no need to have the two lines in separate paragraphs. They do quite well together.
I much prefer the first example as it is more descriptive.
I wish I could find my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. I grew up using it and find it a great tool. Of course, there are other equally good manuals.
Thanks to all who commented in this thread. I'm glad that I am not the only one with these peeves.
Maybe sometime we can talk about commas? ;-)
Janet
Mistress of the Guild of Evil [Strawberry] Blonde Proofreaders
To be or not to be... ask Schrodinger's cat.
Janet
Mistress of the Guild of Evil [Strawberry] Blonde Proofreaders
To be or not to be... ask Schrodinger's cat.
Could we talk about periods instead?
Hey! Get your mind back on the discussion here! Periods (or full stops, if you will) at the end of a sentence require how many spaces? I learned on a manual Underwood typewriter (then got a Royal electric), and the type was pica and everyone drilled into my head that there were ALWAYS 2 spaces at the end of a sentence. Now I am hearing there should be only one. Sigh...
Diana
As far as I understand it,
As far as I understand it, it is _still_ two spaces after a sentence ending punctuation mark - on a typewriter. I still use two spaces even on a computer.
I think they simply allow one period rather than two, as an acceptable variation, much like the 'do you put a comma before 'and' in a list?' (Bob, John, and Joan) versus (Bob, John and Joan). Personally, I feel that you should use the comma as long as all three are distinctly different. If two are together, then you'd eliminate the comma before and.
Isn't English FUN?
(At least it's not French, where everything is mandated by the government)
The Canadian/Quebec version is "Office québécois de la langue française"
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
The space problem...
Nowadays, it's seen as a typographical display issue, and isn't usually seen as being within the purview of an author. Adding spaces to web pages is an exercise in futility, because a thousand spaces will collapse to the same one space as two.
If one is a poet for whom precise visual display is part of the effect one is aiming for, web standards for typographical display offer a wealth of options, allowing one to be pretty much as precise as one wants to be. But for ordinary usage, the basic web standard is to collapse all "white space" to one space, and the reader doesn't usually suffer thereby.
Then too, trying to ""go against the flow" on the web can be very irritating to both authors and readers, because it:
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Aaaaaaaaaaaah! I think I've done ALL of these
The form/from typo is one my most common screw-ups, comma splices are also among my favorites, that and run-on sentence like when you realy don't know when to stop but I digress.
PLEASE, I type bad enough as it is. Don't give me new ideas!
-- snicker --
Their, there, they're, straight strait and so on. Spell and gramar checkers have improved greatly since I first encountered them in the early 1990s but the old Mark I Eyeball still is the best proffer.
John in Wauwatosa
P.S. Make that proofer.
John in Wauwatosa
A Favorite of At Least...
...one writer here: "dinning room" instead of "dining". (Used to drive me crazy, though I didn't stop reading her stories, as I did, for a while, with the one who'd have started this sentence with "use to" rather than "used to".)
Interesting: just ran a search on "dinning room" and got 103 results, with 14 different authors on the first three pages (30 entries) alone. (None of those the author I referenced, though a lot of her stories aren't here any more.) It surprises me, especially since nobody seems to confuse "dinner" with "diner".
Eric
Use to vs. Used to
One should note that for most people who confuse the spelling, "Use to" is the *correct* pronunciation, and the prescriptivist spelling is an antique relic of a dialect they no longer speak, something like the "L" in "palm tree." You'd be surprised how annoyed some people are to hear people talking about "pom trees," since they're not actually native to England.
So if you're in New York and say, "I use to live in the Bowery," that is, in fact, more or less what you're saying, although even more "correct" might be, "I use'tuh live in da Bowry.".
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Pome vs Poem
Most Americans pronounce the internal e in "poem", even though that sound had not been pronounced in the main British dialects for at least a hundred years before the American revolution. We pronounce the t in often, a lot, too. In fact, the confusion between orphan and often in Pirates of Penzance makes no sense to almost all Americans on reading it since there is no common American accent that does not pronounce either the r in orphan or the t in often or both! Also, the first vowel is different.
Californians mostly pronounce the l in palm as do most Southerners. It's, as you said, mostly the people who don't live with them that leave it out. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Poetry...
Yet, oddly enough, few have trouble pronouncing Edgar Allan Poe with only one syllable in his last name.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Couplet...
...from a writer covering the New York Yankees, circa 1922:
Said young Babe Ruth to old Chick Fewster,
"You just don't hit the way you useta".
Eric
well...
... I seem to be totally incapable of typing from, it almost always comes out as form. Does that make me a dyslexic typist? I dunno, I try to mostly catch them but... plus as Ang said it isn't a misspell so a spell-check will not pick it up. I'm sure there are others but that's the one that gets me the most. I try to be idiomatically correct which sometimes means grammar gets screwed and the language gets rough, but in general I like to be as proper as I can be. Of course being a dummy I may make mistakes I'm totally unaware of.
Perhaps if enough people tell me it's a capital offence I'll go throw myself off a tall building to save the poor beleaguered readers FORM such pain. Yes that one was deliberate, but hey... Mea Culpa what's it worth to ya??
Kristina
Thanks everybody!
And yes! I use '!' more than I should!
I have learnt a lot from all your responses, thankyou all!!!
Please Kristina it’s not worth it (throwing yourself off a tall building), I find it very hard to lift myself and then throwing!!
Re Dyslexic:
What's the definition of a dyslexic, insomniac, agnostic?
Answer:
Somebody who lies awake at night wondering if there is a Dog!
That's one of my favourites!
Re editing:
I always cut my comment before pasting to MS-word, review & correct, cut and paste to posting comment, with a minimum no. of strokes (carefull) I get a reasonable english comment! (To bad about the content?)
LoL
Rita
Age is an issue of mind over matter.
If you don't mind, it doesn't matter!
(Mark Twain)
LoL
Rita
speel cheking
I used to do that, until Mozilla Firefox came out with a built-in spell checker.
My pet peeve is the
My pet peeve is the distinction between breathe and breath. It's among the most common errors of this kind I've seen, actually surpassing they're/their/there and your/you're in my statistics. (Yep, I'm a nutter who actually count things like that. Though I only count them when I find them jarring in my reading of the story). I've got a list of similar errors that I find jarring when reading a story, let me see if I can find it...
Wasn't too hard to
Wasn't too hard to find...
adds - ads
ally - alley
are - our
arrange - araigne
bear - bare
bored - board
bowl - bowel
breath - breathe
cavalry - calvary
clamor - climb
click - clique
defiantly - definitely
duel - dual
effect - affect
excepting - accepting
file - fill
forward - foreword
from - form
gait - gate
genital - gentle
grim - grime
immerse - emerge
insure - ensure
instance - instant
know - now
manor - manner
me - be
met - meant
no - now
there - their
of - off
pass (-ed) - past
principal - principle
privet - private
quite - quit
release - realise
revel - reveal
road - rode
role - roll
sight - site
shutter - shudder
threat - treat
threw - through
to - too
vicious - viscous
waist - waste
waive - wave
waking up - walking up
weather - whether
were - wear
wonder - wander
your - you're
faze vs phase
My personal gripe is the use of 'phase' when people mean 'faze'. I haven't seen a single story on this site use the word correctly. A phase is a period in a cycle. To be fazed is to be disconcerted.
People do not get phased, except possibly in Star Trek.
not as think as i smart i am
Mine did
... because Holly Caught the error. It's not a matter of not knowing the difference. It's just typing on automatic. That's what proofers are for.
Portia
Portia
Me!!! Me!!! Pick me!!!!
Please miss, I got it rite!!!!
Somewhere. I think.
Oooh! Forgot starring versus staring.
Not to mention starred versus stared. See it all the time, sets my teeth on edge.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Well, what about ... the blonds ?
Blond and Blonde? One person explained to me that blond is the smart woman whose hair is incidentally that color, but a blonde is a real ditz of the sort that I am sometimes. EEK ! My roomate just said "Sometimes?" ROTFLHRAO.
snark snark
Khadijah
And then there is heals vs.
And then there is heals vs. heels in descriptions of clothing changes.
CaroL
CaroL
Blondie
As a Brit who, many erm, decades ago was forced to do French (hack, ptoo!) in school I can answer you this one.
A Blond is a bloke with yellow hair.
A Blonde is a woman with yellow hair.
For a wide range of values for yellow, obviously.
Generally the extra 'e' on the end indicates feminine, except when it doesn't.
Penny
Brunettes
The same gender differentiation is commonly made for Brunettes (almost always female), but there's no corresponding term "Brun," just "brown-haired." In French, they do have male Brunets, but English tends to ignore it, although it's theoretically accessible as a foreign word. One sees men described as "brunettes" from time to time, but they'd have a right to be offended, since it's a solecism, despite the efforts of some dictionary editors to impose unisex impartiality on a purely feminine term. Might as well talk about male seamstresses, or Mistress John Doe.
"Redheads" are slightly biased toward femininity as well, perhaps because men are less commonly described as being roughly equivalent to their hair.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Blonde vs. Blond
I think it's like Colour vs. Color
Blonde on Blond
Blond is the color of hair or a person with blond hair.
Blonde is a woman with blond hair.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
My buttons
include effect vs affect, there vs their, the list just goes on.
Sorry, I'm in a bit of a mood today, spent the last couple nights writing up my 2010 Federal tax froms. No, not a typo, it's times like this I'm reminded where the feds source their income. From me!
Carla Ann
Infromative!
Am aweighting the next sartorial on proper word ussage with baited breathe :)
~~hugs, Laika
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
Did I say sartorial?
Sorry. I meant tonsorial...
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
Sure That Wasn't Tudorial?
[email protected] ...No, that can't be write. Two much BBSea Amerika!!!
HugZ And GiggelZ,
Joe-Nell,
That's not rite ether!!!;)
[email protected]
My pet 'misspelled' peeve is
My pet 'misspelled' peeve is probably 'discrete' vs 'discreet'. People just can't seem to figure out that when you want to be private, you do things 'discreetly'. Instead, they keep doing things distinctly different - discretely :)
That and the persistent misuse of the word 'moot'. Several hundred years of 'meeting' or 'arguing', and because of some lawyers, it's suddenly 'meaningless'.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Semantic drift
On the moot point :), the same semantic drift can be said to have happened to a lot of words e.g. gay, queer, queen, nice girl and a lot of others like that.
Ah, but it wasn't true
Ah, but it wasn't true semantic drift, where descriptive words are used in their original context, and then that meaning becomes adjusted to the related context. Therefore, someone who was homosexual was considered 'queer', or not quite right. Eventually, 'queer' became more used just for homosexuals, because there were other words to use for 'not quite right'.
With 'moot', it was a misunderstanding that became propagated by additional ignorant people.
Until the 20's, 'moot' was used for meetings, arguments, or debate (or debatable). I still read stories and articles with people saying 'mooted about'. Moot Courts were heard by some people, and they decided that because moot courts argued already decided trials, they must be 'worthless'. Not realising that they were 'moot' courts because the lawyers to be learned how to argue in front of judges.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Insure, ensure, assure
According to the dictionary, those three words may be synonymous. If one is buying insurance for his house, insure is correct. By buying insurance you are ensuring that you have the assurance the house will be paid for in the event of a catastrophic loss. That's probably not quite right.
We have a rather large jewelry store in Arkansas. One of the spokesmen for the company is not able to say 'jewelry'. Instead, he says 'jewry'. It makes for some rather interesting statements in the advertisements on the telly.
Portia
Portia
Heh, heh
Reminds me of a sign I saw in front of a day spa in Walker, MN that was advertising 'message therapy'.
Ah, well.
Janet
Mistress of the Guild of Evil [Strawberry] Blonde Proofreaders
To be or not to be... ask Schrodinger's cat.
Janet
Mistress of the Guild of Evil [Strawberry] Blonde Proofreaders
To be or not to be... ask Schrodinger's cat.
The folks selling "Scott's
The folks selling "Scott's Bonus S" keep talking about destroying "Dollar Weed".
Of course, it comes out 'dahla weed'
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
But Portia ...
We here in the US spell it and say it Jewelry. But out cousin across the pond, say it and spell it jewelery. So why shouldn't he have his own version?
And then there is realtor, too often pronounced realator, even by seemingly half the realtors in California.
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
Realtors...
Of course, over this side of the pond we are more sensible and just call them Estate Agents.
Mind you, Estate Agents have to fight hard to get on the bottom rung of the popularity ladder with lawyers, just above politicians.
Penny
PS I though we called it jewellery...
Worth a re-link...
Just in case you needed further evidence of the wonders of homonyms...
Jerrold H. Zar's Candidate for a Pullet Surprise
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
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