Monday, October 23, 2006

Grammatical Pet-Peeves

I know everyone makes a big deal about my correcting their grammar, but seriously, inasmuch as they went out of their way to make English the most difficult language ever, we might as well repay their magnanimity by speaking it properly. And plus, it really pisses off the British when we try to do it the right way. So here's a few of my grammatical pet-peeves. They're denturific!
1. At what point in our relatively short history did we quit using adverbs? They should be a viable option when it comes to the parts of speech. The only one anybody still uses on a consistent basis is "very," and that's really the least impressive one. Not only that, but people also replace adverbs with adjectives, like "you're driving too fast!" No, I'm not; I'm driving too quickly.
2. Here's a huge one. People need need NEED to start using the word "fewer." The word "less" can only be used to describe a substance lacking in number. Par example, "you have less water than I do," but "I have fewer bottles of water than you do." "My brother has less hair than I do." "He has fewer hairs on his head than I do." It's really quite simple.
3. Everyone knows how I feel about this one. You absolutely cannot end a clause with a preposition. This is entirely inappropriate. As the great Benson & Hedges, Nextel Cup Churchill once said, "this is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put." People screw this up so so so often (there were 3 adverbs in that sentence; they were all the word "so."). Just fix your sentences, my friends. It's really not that hard once you get used to it.
4. This one doesn't make any sense at all. The space for neologism in this language should not be filled with foolishness like the word "'nother." As in, "that's a whole 'nother story." You are allowed to say "that's a whole other story," or "that's an entirely different story." What's the big freakin' deal?!
Ok, these other ones have to do with writing and typing, but they're still really bad.
5. This one is more a still up for debate, but I'm taking a stand, like the X-Men. Whenever you type a period at the end of a sentence, you absolutely must put two spaces after it. One space just won't suffice. Even though it doesn't appear that way in my blog, since the website fixes things the way it wants to, I always have two spaces after my periods. ALWAYS. In this case, as in all cases, less is not more. Even fewer isn't more. More is more.
6. The English language has a magical word called "which." It can be used as a question; "Which way did he go?" It can also be used conjuction style, which is the one which troubles me (the second one there was a pronoun). It gives me conjunctivitis whenever I read a sentence which contains "which" as a conjunction when it is not immediately preceded by a comma, which is necessary.
6. This one is really a no-brainer, but it's still all over the place. Allow me to transcribe a ditty from the inimitable Dr. Bad's e-mail #89 entitled "Local News." In response to Dan's question, Bad sings, "If you want it to be possessive, it's just "I-T-S." But, if it's supposed to be a contraction then it's "I-T-apostrophe-S," scalawag." That pretty much says it all.
Please my friends; I wouldn't ask you to fix these things if I didn't have faith that you could. Pardon me whilst I go bring maaser sheni.