Pet Grammatical Hates
 

As there is a thread catering for pronunciation hates, I thought that maybe we should also cater for the grammatical hates.

I've tried never to be pedantic, but there is always this one advert on our TV which really gets to me. It's an ad about a toilet cleaner and their slogan:

***, kills all known germs dead!

I simply cannot handle it, if it kills the germ, then the germs are ^&*! dead, no need to re-iterate the issue :furious:

Regards
Patrick

In a similar vein: [URL="http://www.killsbugsdead.com"]www.killsbugsdead.com[/URL]

There was a billboard outside a major hardware store in my city a few years back that said:

"Renovations in progress, please bare with us"

Now if this outside a nudist colony I would understand.

Hmm, a thread about grammatical errors. But the first two posts are concerned about tautology, the third one is a spelling error, and this post is complaining that the content of the thread doesn't match its title.
Does anyone have anything to say about pet grammatical hates?

I :furious: the common practice of leaving out "other" or "else". This is quite common by children, advertisers, and the emphatic politicians.

"No {other} soap is as good as Stainbuster." (elsewise Stainbuster is not as good as itself)
"Nobody {else} can run as fast as me."

Not really a grammatical hate, just something that makes me laugh:

"Nothing is as effective as Lemsip Max."

Then use nothing.

I used to be a partner in a decorating firm and would joke that our motto was "[I]Nothing [/I]is too much trouble."

I *hate* it when people negate improperly

i.e. when they mean to say something like "Not all cars are created equal" but they say "All cars are not created equal"

:furious:

Their, there, they're. Confusion of these three drives me nuts. Is that a grammer issue? I don't care, it still drives me nuts.

[QUOTE=bsquared;119638]Their, there, they're. Confusion of these three drives me nuts. Is that a [b]grammer[/b] issue? I don't care, it still drives me nuts.[/QUOTE]

:furious:

Yes, I grind my teeth when I see people misuse there/their/they're. Also, amazing as it may seem, I very frequently seen people mix up are/our. You say it wrong, you spell it wrong I guess. Oh, and "[sh|c|w]ould of" instead of "[sh|c|w]ould have".

I find tautologies amusing, such as "free gift" or "added bonus". What does bother me though is when people take a well known expression, then reverse it for no apparent reason, case in point, "I could care less." AAAAAAAARGH, that's the situation MOST of the time dammit!

One that I'm not bothered by is when someone falls, "head over heels." When of course it should be, and indeed originally was, "heels over head." That one has been reversed for so long though that it was only recently that I heard the correct version and realised what a pile of nonsense the reversed version is. I guess I heard the phrase and associated it with falling, rather than hearing the individual words.

I'm not such an a***hole about spelling, punctuation and grammar though. I'll admit that I do spell words wrong, split infinitives and put, "the," at the beginning of a sentence every once in a while. [i]And[/i] at the start [i]ov[/i] this post I [i]shud of ritton[/i], "If one pronounces it incorrectly then it seems one spells it incorrectly dear Watson." Or something like that.

Oh, I use commas for pretty much everything too. I just don't know where colons or semi-colons go, so a comma will suffice. I mess up with apostrophes too, contractions I understand, but the belonging-to-ness just baffles me.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.


Paul

[sigh]No-one spotted the deliberate mistake, despite the first word being precisely the opposite of what it should have been (and is now) and despite the explicit clue in the text. Where are all the proo-freaders these days?[sigh]