Comments on: Egregious English: 20 Commonly Misused English Words and Phrases

By: Interlocked Pieces - Neat Stuff: 8-9-11

Interlocked Pieces - Neat Stuff: 8-9-11 — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 15:47:02 +0000

[...] Commonly Misused English Words and Phrases – http://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/2009/05/13/egregious-english-20-commonly-misused-words-and-phra... [...]

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:14:40 +0000

The error I despise the most is “alot.” I am not entirely sure what an “alot” is, but many of my students seem to think they do.

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:27:00 +0000

You may have seen it already, but if not, you really should watch the video of comedian Ed Byrne completely dissecting how wrong Alanis Morissette was in her song.

YouTube link here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TVSTkAXg

Also, I saw a very neat graph once explaining the “could care less”/”couldn’t care less” thing. Best way I’ve seen to explain it. I saved it, and you can see it here:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b394/mikekearn/caring-1.png

(I hope links work on your blog, or this post will look weird.)

By: Jennifer Escalona

Jennifer Escalona — Sat, 30 May 2009 00:30:20 +0000

I learned a new word today – nugatory!

By: Judy Jenner

Judy Jenner — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:11:44 +0000

Amen, we couldn’t agree more. We are constantly collecting grammar mistakes — our favorite being, of course, the apostrophe, which could be so simple. Recent favorites include classics such as:

Open Sunday’s
No dog’s in the park
No camera’s allowed (sign in a large Vegas theater)

It really is quite fascinating. Our all-time favorite apostrophe sin is the possessive pronoun in the third person singular. It’s simple: it does not take an apostrophy. You’d be surprised how many press releases we get from large corporations which cannot get this right. We also really like the affect/effect confusion.

By: Manny

Manny — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:22:20 +0000

Thanks, Glenn!

Also, good eye. American usage rules for commas and periods in paranthetical citations are fairly clear, even if they seem illogical sometimes:

Commas and periods should be placed within quotations except when the cited material is a single letter, such as “X”. British rules differ on this, but ultimately it matters most to be consistent.

I think the style with a giant opening quotation and no closing one for longer citations that you see on a lot of websites nowadays does wonders for eliminating this confusion. I use it if a citation is more than two lines of text.

Thanks for reading the blog!

By: Glenn Evanish

Glenn Evanish — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:58:51 +0000

This is lots of fun. Thanks!

A couple of comments:

Your Possessive Pronouns and Contractions missed the granddaddy of them all:
its/it’s

There’s another (small) issue:

Camp”.
“to be.”
“hands”.
window.”
people”.

all appear in this article.

Maybe we can do a follow-up article on 20 common punctuation issues?

Thanks again. -Glenn