This post’s content is slightly tongue in cheek, but it will resonate with some people.
Perhaps it’s my age, and that’s why I’m less tolerant of poor English usage (and I’m no saint), but there are several dreadful commonly used errors I hear every day that really grate with a lot of people—not just me. I’ve read one quote that people should be fined for using one of them!🤣🤣🤣
And yes, as a child I was constantly told off for dropping Hs and other stupid corrections one of which I looked up, when I was older, and I discovered I was grammatically right. 😇 It was, for example, ‘he gave ice creams to Fred and me’. I was always corrected to say ‘I’ instead of ‘me’. Wrong! Because if you split the sentence up, he gave an ice cream to Fred and he gave an ice cream to me, it’s obvious. Me is correct, not I, because you’d never say ‘Fred gave an ice cream to I’. 🤣🤣🤣
Let’s start with ‘So’ to begin a sentence (the ‘should be fined’ example). I know ‘so’ can be used as a pause for thought to say something, more often than not used in the middle of a sentence and just very occasionally at the beginning, when the new topic follows on. But now it’s used so often at the beginning that I switch off, and I also think it’s sometimes used to be patronising, let alone plain irritating. Just listen to someone introducing him/herself on a quiz show – ‘So, I’m a student (or whatever) and …’ Or the news on TV, where you’ll hear it all the time, often sounding patronising – ‘So, I’m an Expert and that’s why you’re asking me…’ (No! I’m fuming so much with your opening ‘So’ I’m not even listening to you…) 😱
When people say ‘should of’ when they really mean should’ve (have). Ditto, ‘would of’, ‘could of’ etc 😱
When people say invite, when they mean invitation. E.g. ‘thanks for the invite.’ 🤷🏼♀️ No, ‘Thanks for the invitation.’ Or, ‘thank you for inviting me.’
And that flipping annoying ‘glottal T stop’/‘glottalisation’ (I looked up the names for it), sounds really ignorant! If you can pronounce a T at the beginning or end of a word, why can’t you say it in the middle? There are ads running on the TV (UK) using it, which contain the word mortar pronounced wrongly as mor’ar, and another is motor not mo’or. 😱😱😱 I won’t be using your services then!
There’s one author’s books I find enjoyable, until I see this one: Over-using ‘really’ in a follow-up sentence. It’s usually totally unnecessary reinforcement. (Eg. He can write a book. He really can.) 🤷🏼♀️ Used once I could forgive it, but used several times in a book – no. 🥱
I know we’ll all be guilty of regional dialects/pronunciations and ways of speaking, and as I studied Teaching English as a Foreign Language I learned there are global ‘Englishes’. But the grating examples I’ve mentioned above are used many, many times, every time I switch on the TV, every day, in England (the home of English!) 🤷🏼♀️
End of rant! 🤣🤣🤣
MoorScribbles 