Words are everywhere these days, thanks to social media -- along with pictures, of course. Social media platforms like Facebook (aside from the cute cat and dog videos and pictures) abound with words. Blogs -- millions of blogs -- all with something to say. With those words inevitably come mistakes in grammar that bother people like me. For example, if I had a dime for every misused apostrophe in Facebook posts, I'd be retired on my country estate in England or in my chateau in the Loire valley now. It's such a simple thing to learn -- NEVER use an apostrophe to make something plural. This omnipresent misuse annoys me, though by now I should be inured to it. Some might say that I'm an overly persnickety fussbudget. Others might agree with me. English, they say, is a living language and continues to evolve. That's true, of course, otherwise we wouldn't have abominable words like selfie.
The rules of grammar that I learned so painstakingly in junior high and senior high English classes, thanks to Mrs. Gerard, Mrs. Leverette, and Mrs. England, are considered by some to be passé, but they are so ingrained that I still find their misuse annoying forty years and more later. Misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, run-on sentences, sentence fragments -- all those signs of poor grammar, once upon a time -- no longer seem to matter. And don't get me started on the subjunctive.
We all, as readers or writers or both, most likely have these quirks -- usage we find in the books we read that annoy us. One that always leaps out at me in a book is the use of the mental note. Characters are forever making mental notes, and I always wonder how one does this. I get the image of a Post-It note stuck on a brain whenever I see mental note in a book. It's a cliché and one that I wish would simply go away.
Another thing that bothers me is misquotation (along with using quote as a noun). One misquotation that always leaps out at me is "Pride goes before a fall." This has been misquoted so often that it has become standard usage. The actual quotation is: "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." (Proverbs 16:18, King James Version)
A second misquotation that consistently pops up is "Such stuff as dreams are made of." Well, if you're going to quote Shakespeare, methinks, you should do it correctly. This comes from The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1, and the line actually is:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
There are other examples that I will no doubt remember later, but these are two that I run across most often. In junior and senior high, and later in college, I had to read a lot of Shakespeare for various classes, and odd bits still linger in the memory banks. Like "midnight mushrumps" from The Tempest, when Prospero is casting a spell. (And yes, I know it's a sentence fragment, but what can you do?) I like midnight mushrumps. It sounds more poetic than midnight mushrooms for some reason.
I try not to violate the rules of grammar as I learned them, lo those many years ago, but no doubt I have occasionally strayed from the path of righteousness. I can promise you one thing, however: I will not be making any mental notes.
Oh, what joy! Never drop your standards, Dean. Okay, I apologise for my sentence fragments. But when it comes to subjunctives - there's a US/UK difference. The subjunctive is much deader in the UK than it is here. Would that it were not, but it is. I'm guilty of using "quote (n)" too, but never "invite(n)", which makes me shudder.
Posted by: catriona | May 11, 2016 at 08:40 AM
So, so true. And to rub salt into the wound, my grandson's college English teacher gave him a "B" for an essay that contained: run on sentences, capitalization errors, punctuation errors, and the ever present apostrophe - such as the one in Jim Jone's.
And then, there is my 15-year-old granddaughter that writes "nmd" for never mind.
Posted by: Judy Enersen | May 11, 2016 at 11:25 AM
Sigh. Couldn't agree more.
All that GLISTERS is not gold ...
Water, water everywhere NOR ANY drop to drink!
Not to mention waiting for something with "baited" breath. Always wonder what it's baited with. Tuna?
Posted by: Marcia Talley | May 11, 2016 at 12:51 PM
I try. I know that grammar is important. But I can't remember all those rules. I'm sure people cringe at what I write and post on the internet, but I think I'm usually fairly close to the grammar rules. Hopefully, I'm at least understandable.
Posted by: Mark | May 11, 2016 at 08:45 PM
How about, "Oh," she thought to herself, "what if…"
Who else are you going to think to?
And yes, forgive me for sentence fragments.
And "Invite." Cannot bear it. Cannot. And "old fashion" whatever. Auggh.
Posted by: Hank Phillippi Ryan | May 12, 2016 at 11:44 AM
On the back of the t-shirts a few male students were wearing on campus back in the early 70s, when reading The Happy Hooker was all the rage:
Xaviera's Boy's.
Of all the places to use an apostrophe for a plural ... I honestly don't think these guys were actually implying what they thought they were. (And, no, they were het.)
Posted by: Mario R. | May 16, 2016 at 06:32 PM
What about modifying "unique"? If something is unique, it is one (from the Latin); how can it be "more" or "very"?
Mother always claimed that "very" was weakening, with an implication of not always. I didn't go to D. C. public schools or Wilson Teachers' College during the depression of the 1930's, so I can't cite her reference for this argument.
Do teens who "graduate high school" paint inches, feet, and yards up the side of the building?
Posted by: Anne Murphy | May 17, 2016 at 06:03 AM