The Grammar Nazi in You!

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

I am universally annoying when it comes to grammar in text form.

If I have the time, I always make sure that what I write is grammatically correct, and most of the people I talk to on stuff like Skype, do so too around me.

But other than that, I'm not much of a grammar Nazi.

In common parlance, I tend to not care all that much, what infuriates me are poorly-formed arguments or when the opposition begins shouting to prevent making any valid points and drown me out in the process.

 

[geK0]

I have... issues... with the LGBT[insert whatever other letters you deem appropriate here] movement's "use" of Latin and Greek. In particular "Homophobia" (the fear of Hominids) and "Pansexuality" (being sexually attracted to literally everything.)

Cisgender, though, the one which gets everyone else's collective goats, that's one's ok.

I've pointed this out to people before on multiple occasions, but was reminded each time that I am a terrible human being for suggesting those words aren't technically correct.

Cisgender is correct, but it just seems a little redundant to refer to somebody as cismale or cisfemale.



OT:

I'm not too pedantic when it comes to grammar, especially not in an informal setting such as a video game forum. I usually notice when people use the wrong they're/there/their, where/wear/where/were and such, but I really don't care, I can usually figure out what the person means by the context. I'll usually forgive minor errors like these (in an essay or cover letter they would be major, but in a text or on a gaming forum, not so much) .

Sometime's I am a little irritated when people use acronyms and assume everyone knows what they're talking about. I'm not talking about common things like "LOL" "OMG" "WTF" "GG" "OT" but people who will refer to a game, book, TV show. I usually know what the person is referring to by context, and if not I can Google it, but is it that hard to have just said "Game of Thrones" instead of "GoT" or "Lord of the Rings" instead of "LOTR"?


I welcome you all to proof read this post, because I sure as Hell didn't (aint nobuddy got tim fo dat).

 

[SmallHatLogan]

Obviously your/you're and their/there/they're are the most common.

I was on a crusade against apostrophe abuse once upon a time. People constantly using apostrophes to denote a plural (apostrophe's rather than apostrophes for example) was kind of a trigger for me. Especially common with acronyms and numbers (DVD's, 1980's) and words that end with vowels. I've accepted that it's a lost cause though so I don't get quite as annoyed.

Ellipsis abuse is another one that annoys me (I have a friend on facebook who would end sentences with them all the time and I would always get on his case about it) but it's not all that common.

People not knowing the difference between bias and biased is another irritating one but interestingly I've been seeing it less and less over the years.

"For all intensive purposes". Ugh, shoot me now. I even once saw "for all tense purposes".

There's also the largely American "I could care less" as opposed to "I couldn't care less" which makes no sense at all. I've seen arguments that it's short for "I could care less but it's not even worth my time" or some bullshit like that. Not buying it.

 

[BathorysGraveland2]

A good "u mad bro?" still gets a laugh out of me on occasion simply because "You mad, bro?" just doesn't have the same impact, but otherwise I have to agree that text-speech abbreviations are pretty obnoxious. I don't even use them while texting, though I won't berate people who do.

Well I understand it when using cell phones, since trying to type on those buttons can be very annoying, especially when you have to press the same button 2 or 3 times to get to one of the letters (no idea if this has changed on more modern devices). However, with a keyboard, there is little excuse beyond a lack of literacy.

 

[Demonjazz]

Chav. I don't know why but I just hate the sound of that word. You know how some people hate the word moist just cause it sounds gross. Well that's what Chav sounds like to me. Or somebody who can't pronounce chives.

 

[Strazdas]

I am not a native English speaker. As such i make a lot of mistakes and i appreciate when people correct me being helpful. what infuriates me is the grammar nazies that claim that my opinion is incorrect because i made a spelling mistake in my post. these people can go and disconnect their internet.

A good "u mad bro?" still gets a laugh out of me on occasion simply because "You mad, bro?" just doesn't have the same impact, but otherwise I have to agree that text-speech abbreviations are pretty obnoxious. I don't even use them while texting, though I won't berate people who do.

u mad bro? get rekt, 1v1 u dai! me father gabe newell U be Bannd!

P.S. this was obviuosly meant as a joke.

:/ Why must jerks also have bad grammar?

well if we had time to learn grammar properly we wouldnt have time to be jerks!

Alot. This is not aword it is a lot.

Alot is a word. it is a name of an animal.

Starting a sentence with 'and' or 'but' is a breach of written grammatical rules.

This is unacceptable. The rules must be changed.

capcha: muffled rap music
rap has a l,ot of grammar now?

 

[Ratty]

It's a pet peeve of mine when people misuse the word "literally".

"Oh my god, I was so embarrassed I like, just died. Literally." Really, you literally died? Am I talking to a ghost?

In their attempts to add needless emphasis they're using a word that directly contradicts their intended message. It just makes ya wanna quote Inigo Montoya. Well, moreso than one might feel the urge to quote Inigo Montoya at any given time anyway.

 

[FPLOON]

I don't know if this fully counts or not, but whenever people try to guess how to spell my real name... It's not much, but it does bug me a little whenever a letter or two are either presumed switched or different than how it's actually spelled... (especially my last name, it seems...)

 

[DirgeNovak]

Since English is my second language, pretty much any mistake I instantly spot makes me facepalm. If you're an English native speaker and I write your language better than you do, I will laugh at you.

I was on a crusade against apostrophe abuse once upon a time. People constantly using apostrophes to denote a plural (apostrophe's rather than apostrophes for example) was kind of a trigger for me. Especially common with acronyms and numbers (DVD's, 1980's) and words that end with vowels.

This is probably what annoys me the most. I just don't understand where this mistake comes from. I can kind of understand what the your/you're thing stems from, but putting apostrophes everywhere and anywhere? I don't even.

 

[Fearzone]

When people spell judgment (correct), as "judgement."

Except, I got called on it the other day, with a coworker suggesting that the two are both acceptable spellings. Nonsense, I retorted, and I Googled it to show I was right. Except Google told me that both are common spelling and generally acceptable, even if Merriam-Webster strongly favors "judgment." 10 years ago "judgement" was widely regarded as a misspelling but I guess standards are falling.

I guess I'll let this one go.

 

[AliasBot]

Using "weary" in place of "wary." (As in "Titanfall looks nice, but I'm still going to be a bit weary of buying it because EA" or something like that.) It happens all the time and for the life of me I can't figure out why, the words aren't pronounced the same way and have mostly unrelated definitions. If anything I'd expect people to leave off a letter and use wary instead of weary, but it's very much a one-way street and nobody really seems to notice it. Some of the more common stuff makes me grimace, but their there they're common enough that it just comes across as someone not caring about the grammar they use online or generally being bad at it, so its its' it's more of a statement about the person than anything else. It's a bit more of an issue for me when someone that otherwise has good grammar makes that particular error.

(Using "loose" instead of "lose" is similar, though it's at least common enough that other people have noticed it. Still irritating, though.)

("I could care less" is also a big one. I never quite noticed how contradictory that phrase was until my mother went on a rant about it something like a year and a half ago. Now it irritates the hell out of me.)

(Oh, one last irritation: the lack of capitalization and punctuation in forum, Facebook, etc. posts. In chats I don't care, since it's a more casual setting, the point is still gotten across, and you're trying to reply quickly in real time. On a forum, though, when nobody is hanging on your word and you have all the time in the world to edit what you say before you post it? That's a problem.)

(Huh, judging by all of these parentheses it seems like I care about proper grammar/spelling more than I thought I did.)

 

[Bellvedere]

In a casual setting, provided I know what someone means I don't care about proper grammar. We have language to communicate with each other, if we can do that then we're doing alright. Being pedantic about it in a forum setting seems mostly pointless to me, but I guess it's just a crooked painting thing for some people. Providing it's still easily understandable, I actually mostly enjoy the sound of deviations from standard English rather than find it abrasive.

I guess the more formal the context the more grammar starts to matter to me but stylistics is probably more important by that stage anyway.

 

[wickedmonkey]

My worst triggers would be "welp" and "could care less". It's a "well" that's cut short and "couldn't care less" damn it!

 

[Vausch]

I think this sums it up nicely.

Spoiler: Naughty rant language

 

[Barbas]

I am not a native English speaker. As such i make a lot of mistakes and i appreciate when people correct me being helpful. what infuriates me is the grammar nazies that claim that my opinion is incorrect because i made a spelling mistake in my post. these people can go and disconnect their internet.

A good "u mad bro?" still gets a laugh out of me on occasion simply because "You mad, bro?" just doesn't have the same impact, but otherwise I have to agree that text-speech abbreviations are pretty obnoxious. I don't even use them while texting, though I won't berate people who do.

u mad bro? get rekt, 1v1 u dai! me father gabe newell U be Bannd!

P.S. this was obviuosly meant as a joke.

Shutup losers my brother works for Steam. ur all gonna get baned! [http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120511112335/batman/images/f/f0/Bane_TDKR3.jpg]

*Hand crashes into desk*...You also misspelt "Nazis".

OT: I was standing in a bar on a university campus once when someone shouted "LOLOLOLOLOLOL!" at a friend's joke.....I didn't go back.

Apart from that, only stuff that alters the meaning of a sentence and inhibits communication really gets to me.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

English is my second language, so I'm quite alright with common mistakes.

I find it very annoying when people don't care to use pronouns or articles at all however. Sometimes that happens because of laziness, sometimes it's because the person making the mistake natively speaks a language that has different rules regarding pronouns and sentence structure.

Either way, sentences like: "Seems that bananas have disappeared", rub me the wrong way.

That kind of speech is usually found in bad translations of Asian languages in my experience. I respect that it's not easy to come up with correct translations for that material, but I can't help but to be annoyed by it.

 

[McElroy]

The double space. It may have had some utility before, but in this modern age with justified text alignment? Just no.

I like to correct other Finns about compound words. The logic behind those is often very skewed or simply nonexistent.

 

[Skeleon]

"I could care less". At least a lot of the other ones are honest mistakes based on similar pronunciation (your/you're, they're/there/their etc.), but "I could care less" is the exact opposite of what they meant to say (and I can only imagine it developed out of "I couldn't care less" somehow when some people learnt the phrase, but obviously made a mistake in how they adopted it).

 

[kurupt87]

"W/C/Sh-ould of" instead of "w/c/sh-ould've". It's a misspelling, a grammatical error and an incorrect word usage all in one. Seeing it instantly makes me ctrl+w.

 

[Bluestorm83]

I've got a lot of these. Lots of relatives in fun places where people don't know how to talk.

I hear people say "Sahl" instead of "saw," like "Yeah, I sahl her walkin' across the street."

Melk. "Do me a favor, pour me a glass of melk." Disgusting. Sounds like some hybrid of MILK and a mucous substance.

Festid. You know, like the holidays get? "With all the decorations up, everything looks so festid." Nothing to do with insects, they're just too stupid to say Festive.

Woman. Doesn't sound wrong, does it? Well, it is when people can't say it PLURALLY. "There were five woman waiting outside the door." Why can't this work in reverse? Why can't I wind up settling down with a nice women?

Cuba Gooding Junior. Have a stepbrother who once tried, unsuccessfully, to say this man's name for almost 5 minutes. The closest he got was "Cubing Goobing Goon- wait. Cubing- wait, Cubing- wait, Cubing- wait," on and on and on. He has no speech impediments, nor learning disabilities. It was simply as if a train of letters crashed into his speech center and he was trying to dig Cuba's name out from under a pile of Gs and Bs.

There's more, but I can't think right now.