Whatever happened to good grammar? Where’s it at (tongue-in-cheek interrogative)? Please don’t end a sentence with at. If you want to know the location of something, it will suffice to simply ask, “where is it”?
I am, on a daily basis, mystified by the never-ending display of malapropisms, the general misuse of words, and the lack of adherence to grammatical norms. Oddly, many of the snafus are made by professional commentators and the news media. Hearing these blunders from professionals is painful. I hope you will, as a reminder or as a first-time-revelation, publish this list of random offenses I have enumerated below in the hope it will enlighten and change some behavior.
Disinterested does not mean you are not interested. It is an attribute a judge should display, which is a lack of bias. Uninterested reveals your indifference to a subject.
Anxious and eager are not synonymous. Anxious reveals a degree of anxiety. Eager is a welcoming emotion.
Evacuate is something you do to a building or forest, for example, but not to a person. Evacuating a person is what takes place when embalming someone.
When you laugh and other people can hear you, you are laughing aloud…not out loud. This also grammatically invalidates lol.
Jealousy and envy have different meanings. Jealousy reveals a romantic inclination. Envy is what you do when you wish you had a boat like that of your neighbor.
The correct use of I or me in a sentence seems to befuddle many people. I find the use of I is generally applied as a default choice when there is a question relative to which form to use. Correct: It belongs to you and me. Incorrect: It belongs to you and I. There is a simple test. Try the sentence without the first person in the sentence. The result is it belongs to me. Most would agree that it belongs to I doesn’t ring true.
Perhaps the most egregious errors made by sports casters (but not limited to them) involve a total lack of understanding of simple past tense and the past perfect tense. Phrases such as “he could have ran,” or “he could have went the other way” are real nerve graters. He could have run or he could have gone are, of course, the correct usage. Irregular verbs and the study of perfect tenses would be a good source for clarification.
Farther and further is a battle I’ve already lost. Often a word is misused so frequently it becomes acceptable. I object. Further means to enhance as in the furtherance of a cause. Farther implies distance.
Chronic is an oft misused word. Chronic pain, for example, does not in any way describe the degree of severity of said pain. Chronic means constant and no more.
Irregardless, regardless of what you may think, is not a word.
Redundant and repetitive are not synonymous. Redundant refers to over-doing not redoing. A good example is the expression widow woman. By definition, a widow is a woman, thus widow woman is a redundancy.
Ironic is often misused to mean coincidence, bad luck, or a twist of fate. An ironic statement is one where literal words are used to convey an opposite meaning, i.e., If someone who only loves warm and sunny weather steps outside on a freezing cold day and says “I love beautiful days like this” … that’s ironic.
Peruse is one of those words that has been commonly misused. It is mostly misused to mean to skim or glance over something. It’s true meaning is to leisurely read a document to thoroughly review what has been written. It may be a subtle distinction but they are different.
Recurring vs reoccurring: Recurring events happen at regular intervals like car payments etc. Reoccurring represents something that has happened before that is happening again but not with any regularity.
Unorganized vs. Disorganized: Disorganized is an adjective. It means having fallen into disarray. You can think of disorganized as describing something that was once organized, but now is not. Unorganized is also an adjective. It describes something which is not arranged in any specific way, or more simply messy.
Sometime vs Some Time: The one-word sometime refers to a vague, unspecified time—for example: Thousands of dollars were allegedly stolen from the bank’s ATM vault sometime between Friday and Sunday. The two-word some time usually means quite a while—for example: It had been some time since Rita and her husband, Scott, had attended a wedding. It also works where some is an adjective referring to time—for example: I’ve been spending some time thinking about where I might find ancient artifacts.
If interested in grammar and punctuation, I recommend a book by Lynne Truss called “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.” Her treatment of grammar and punctuation is sprinkled with humor. It’s a great primer.
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