A lot of grammar nits here on OOT, and I'm one of them. Inspired by the recent thread "Answering call's based on caller ID" and other such hilarity, I'm uniting all of us under the umbrella of this common cause and sharing our frustration over the internets with citations of our complaints.

We don't even need to talk about how awful the your/you're problem has become. In fact, studies show that if you surf BBV or BBV4L (or posts written by *TT*), you'll actually see over 70% misuse of your/you're, so that seeing it correctly qualifies as an exception.

More subtle and annoying is the overuse (and misuse, frankly) of the word literally. For that, I bring you this. Here you'll see videos of people saying sh*t like Another issue we nits have is the ridiculous use of apostrophes, as indicated in the first paragraph. For that, I bring you this. You'll see such amazing photos as

and



And then we have the good ol' misuse of quotation marks. This is a phenomenon I didn't realize existed so widely. Are this many people randomly using completely pointless quotes? For that, I bring you this. Here we see the head-slapping images of:

and



Now all we need is a site dedicted to there/they're/their, loose/lose, and comma splices like "John, wasn't home."

Nits -- you're not alone.

Any other grammar/punctuation diseases I missed?

Man, I should of written this post.

EDIT: A liquor store near me bills itself as having OVER "800" WINES.

[x] gets the idea

Do we forgive our Asian brothers over at http://www.engrish.com ? Because correcting that rip in the grammar-space-time continuum would result in a lot less funny on the internet.

At my local bar someone wrote on the wall that "Tom eat's penis" and someone circled it in red and put gmr? just like a teacher would and I died laughing, "literally".

Wow, this one is even too nitty for me. Someone actually dedicated a blog to people who use all capital letters except for L, which is put in lowercase for some reason. Evidently this happens a lot.

We should definately talk about spelling errors as well.

I think we are already for all intensive purposes.

Since this is a thread essentially dedicated to nittery, I don't feel too bad about pointing out that this is not a comma splice.

Oh, and someone the other day said "I'd just assume" when he clearly meant "I'd just as soon," but I don't think this is an epidemic or anything.

lets not loose focus

In third grade my teacher taught us that you were ONLY supposed to use apostrophe's for contractions, and for no other reason. Wow that guy ****ed with our heads, literally.

awesome deal

Misuse of "due to." Misuse of farther when it should be further (and vice versa). People who say "hung" when referring to a hanging.

this thread needs spellchecked

I don't know why we're all so bias against these uses of language.

Also, istewart, I think you should try to get "well hanged" out there in the public idiom.

FYP

There was one of those crappy giant dollar stores near my place where their slogan was Nothing Over a Dollar, "Ever". Hmm, so by "ever", you mean always?

Ooh, how about express lanes at the grocery store featuring signs that say "12 items or less?" (1)





(1) I'm pretty sure this is a David Foster Wallace Memorial Gripe.

Example?

I see what you did there.

The first page of the drink menu at Capitol City Brewery in northwest D.C. is titled "Martini's". I won't return until they fix it.

Man, that's a bit much.

On a side note, I dig on the avatar - it's what I've been using as my Stars avatar for years.

superfluous apostrophe, but totally nailed the your/you're

I could care less about anything in this thread.

Irregardless of what you say I could care less what all you nits think about my spelling and grammar anyways.

I think you're post beat mine by < 10 seconds.