It depends on whether you want to appear literate or not

[Sapphire Silk]

Or like where and were.

I'm starting to see a LOT of incorrect spelling and grammar sneaking into print ads in major newspapers and the like.

Don't get me started. The errors I see in the news are getting to be far too frequent. It's like there are editors anymore.

[EvilEmpryss]

According to the book The Most Common Errors in English Usage and How to Avoid Them (Bender, 2003, p. 36) a collective noun can be either singular or plural, according to the sense of the sentence. So in this case either would be correct. I can see both sides of the argument, as most people picture a staff as a group of individuals (therefore plural) as opposed to a single entity (and thus singular). Not something to be throwing a fit over, though.

Don't get me started. The errors I see in the news are getting to be far too frequent. It's like there are no editors anymore.

Fixed that for ya.

A classic example from this morning was a Jeb Bush quote: "Now I understand the letters my dad wrote about George and I."

Aaaarrrggghhh!!! No. No. No!!! People try to sound fancy and educated by using "I" instead of "me", but if you take out the other person ("Now I understand the letters my dad wrote about I.") it's clearly wrong.

I'm a spelling and grammar Nazi. I'm not perfect, but when people make glaring obvious mistakes in a business setting I want to pull my hair out by the roots. Maybe and may be are different, as are there, their, and they're. My favorite recent error, though? I saw a batch of signs outside a car dealership two weeks ago announcing:

All Trades Excepted!

[Chromatix]

My pet peeve is discreet (quiet, subtle) versus discrete (distinct, separate). Homophones seem to be a major sticking point for people taught on the phonics system, which basically includes the entire current generation of Americans.

There are some languages (eg. Finnish) whose spelling is highly consistent with pronunciation - these tend to be languages which have only been written down (or have had a spelling reform) relatively recently, and whose spelling system was designed by an actual linguist rather than by some random typesetter (which is what happened for English). For those languages, a phonics system makes a lot of sense.

Finnish grammar is also relatively straightforward. It has more inflections and more rules than English does, but those rules have very few exceptions - for example there's a class of verbs which conjugate in an alternative way, but these are consistent within themselves, and there's only *one* truly irregular verb. So you can spend time learning the rules instead of the exceptions.

Of course, if you try to speak Finnish using the written language, it instantly marks you as a foreigner - the spoken language is abbreviated and full of slang.

Japanese is another interesting example, because while two of it's writing systems (hiragana, katakana) are phonetic (mostly - there are a couple of special cases), the third (kanji) is designed to convey meaning rather than sound, much like different spellings of homophones do in English - only much more extensively. As you can imagine, native Japanese speakers are even more fond of puns than English speakers are.

The downside is that you have to learn to recognise over 2000 different symbols, instead of the 52 needed for English (26 upper case, 26 lower case) or the slightly larger number needed for most European languages. Japanese children are effectively still learning to read until they reach high school! The kanji are taught in a particular order, so material written for a young audience can use the subset which children of that age are expected to know.

[PepperElf]

There's a similar issue with the Arabic language. Although the written language itself is very old - the classic language dates back to the 6th century - in many areas there's issues with how names are spelled due to translation or (in some regions, literacy issues).

For example:Muammar Gaddafi

I was going to list the different spellings for that one ... until I looked it up on wiki (note #3) and found out that one source lists 32 spellings, while a couple of other sources list 112 different spellings. And not even the family agrees on the spelling either... while he uses "Al-Gathafi" on the passport, his son uses "Qadhafi"

and that's just one family. I hate to see how many other families have similar spelling differences

[siskaren]

Use of "loose" when "lose" was intended (or vice-versa) drives me to take big, ragged bites out of whatever I'm reading.

I agree; it drives me insane.

Just got a flyer from National Demonic Branded Pizza co.
It was entitled "Offering's".

I think apostrophes in plurals are my biggest spelling/grammar pet peeve. There's another message board I'm on where one poster claims in her profile to be a teacher, yet her posts are riddled with apostrophes in plurals!

They're, there and their.
and of course your and you're

This one drives me insane too. It makes me wonder if some people aren't familiar with the concept of contractions because I just can't see how they could think that your means you are otherwise.

A classic example from this morning was a Jeb Bush quote: "Now I understand the letters my dad wrote about George and I."

Aaaarrrggghhh!!! No. No. No!!! People try to sound fancy and educated by using "I" instead of "me", but if you take out the other person ("Now I understand the letters my dad wrote about I.") it's clearly wrong.

Yet another one that drives me insane. Where it really drives me nuts is when I hear it on a scripted TV show, since that means it was written by someone who gets paid to write! And what really gets me about it is how many people had to have read and/or heard the line before the show was filmed, yet apparently not one of them realized there was anything wrong with it.

[EricKei]

Empryss: Dang! you beat me to it 8p

Along with "loose" vs "lose" and "affect" vs "effect", I would have to say that one of my biggest pet peeves with "confused words" has got to be "breath" vs "breathe". Webcomic authors, I am looking directly at you I cannot count the number of times I have seen the phrase "I can't breath!" from people who really should know better, including those who have been published in print for things they have written on entirely different subjects!

There are two important things I have learned over my years of acting as a semi-pro grammar cop:

- A spell-check is never enough

- You are your own worst proofreader

PS: Long Live the Oxford Comma!

[taurinejunkie]

English is my second language and strangely enough I seem to use it more properly than some native users, except for the accent which I'm trying to eliminate. As a result, any mistakes I am able to spot irritate me.

[EvilEmpryss]

I learned college English from a professor born in Turkey. Her opinion on why she understood the rules of English better than we did was that she had to learn English from scratch by following the proper rules. We native speakers learn all sorts of bad habits from our families and our culture before we ever get exposed to the proper rules, which means we have to unlearn what we first learned in order to get it right.

Now we have a generation growing up texting... I H8 2 C KIDZ 4GET HOW 2 RITE.

[taurinejunkie]

Most modern smartphones (that i know of) have a virtual or actual QWERTY keyboard, which in my very humble opinion means there's no excuse to use text-talk anymore.

[EricKei]

TJ and EE: Agreed on all counts ^_^ ...both on the language learning front, and on the failure-to-spell front from cell users.

Remember, these kids who kannt spel tu gud and use horrible text speak often learned to type on computers with full QWERTY keyboards anyway...and they resorted to L337 $P34K there anyway. Still no excuse. Still very sad.

[siskaren]

Empryss: Dang! you beat me to it 8p

Along with "loose" vs "lose" and "affect" vs "effect", I would have to say that one of my biggest pet peeves with "confused words" has got to be "breath" vs "breathe".

Another one I see a lot is "wander" and "wonder".

[dalesys]

There's a pawn shop on 35th that has mis-spelled "Dollar" for 40+ years... as part of the name of the store... And some of the signs (of the same vintage!) are spelled correctly.

On lose/loose... My daughter's friend had a tat on his arm: "Born to loose"... he wasn't into archery. At least they didn't double the "o" in to.

[EvilEmpryss]

Could be worse. It could have read: "Borne too loose".

Actually, "Born too loose" might be a correct statement, for a girl's tramp-stamp.

[PepperElf]

Another one i see is "past" and "passed". Even I sometimes have to pause to remember which one I want to use.

A recent fanfic I was reading had some similar mistakes - although thankfully the plot was pretty good (although perhaps a bit childish near the end). Someone already posted a review on some of the spelling issues, such as using "roll" instead of "role," as well as a variant on the past/passed mixup (using "pasted" instead of "passed")

However.... no one seems to have caught the best one from the bunch though. In one scene the hero took the heroine's gloves off of her hands and saw how icy her hands were...
Erik: *having taken off the woman's gloves* You're frigged, Meg.

Me: ... o that's funny!

[siskaren]

Another one I just thought of (and to be honest, I don't know why I didn't think of it before since it's a huge pet peeve of mine) is should of, would of, and could of, instead of should've, would've and could've.