The word "healthful" ought to be banned from the next printing of the Oxford Dictionary. 99.9% of people use "healthy" and it f'ing works just as well. Only research papers bother to use the grammatically correct version.Let's just chalk it up to another one of our million exceptions to the rule. Everybody's going to be speaking English soon enough anyway.

PJ is at least on the right track with this, most of you don't seem to have thought this through. There is nothing grammatically, or logically, incorrect with the phrase "i could care less". It is a real phrase and it makes perfect logical sense. It's used to convey apathy. It means you could care less about something, not that you do actually care about something. The phrase "i couldn't care less", implies you are literally unable to care any less about something.

Yes people misuse it all the time and the phrase is vague/fluffy in what it conveys, but stating that "i could care less" doesn't make sense or is incorrect, is itself, incorrect.

I love this thread.

WRT the punctuation at the end of the sentence issue, what is the appropriate way to end a sentence where the quotation ends with punctuation? I think JaredL posted something similar. For example:

The sentence that she said was "Where are we going?".
The sentence that she said was "Where are we going?."

I really have no idea how American style is supposed to handle this. Perhaps just leave off the question mark, but that does not seem right, especially if you are trying to convey quoting text character for character.

I sometimes say "I COULD care less...but I don't" for fun when I do not care about something. Or I will say "I could care less" when I actually do care about it, usually in a way pointing out that my usage of the phrase is correct and contrary to common usage.

Where i Live (Stoke on Trent, UK), people have a habit of saying " I aren't sure" rather than im non sure. Tilts the hell out of me!

I'm grunching but is it pushing the nit envelope a little too far when I cringe the instant I see someone use i.e. or e.g., since the success rate on that has to be approaching random chance?

Leave off the period.

I covered this one already, complete with the actual Latin they abbreviate.

A few years ago I was flicking through some chick mag (a Cleo or some such), and there was a section in it where girls wrote in about their most amazing sexual experiences. I can't remember the precise details of this one girl's story, but I do remember that it culminated in an orgasm so intense that she 'litterally exploded'!

Something about the imagery of that, I laugh out loud every time I think of it.

Here's a conversation that you will often have with British people (OK, not the whole conversation; just the bolded part):

Me: God damn it, someone knocked my side-view mirror off. I should call the cops.
British person: Yeah, you should do.

I camed.

Can someone explain the "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo /.../ buffalo." thing a few pages back? I am not a native speaker and I don't get it et al. I think I have seen something similar with the word fish and I don't get that one either.

Just wanted to chime on on the serial comma thing. I get asked to edit things all the time, and I don't think my style is at all stuffy, but I love the serial comma.

When I get to the "blow and Cheez-Its" part of Becca's sentence and see there's no comma, it's like someone hits the fast-forward button on my eyes and the entire flow is ruined. When the serial comma is included, the pace is completely natural in my head.

And since the logic of the serial comma is sometimes important, I've never really thought there was much of a counterargument. So this thread has been eye-opening! I honestly didn't know that there were smart and careful people who hated the serial comma, and now I'm depressed.

Here's another one: How do you guys punctuate an independent clause after a colon? And do you use one space or two?

One space, capitalize the first letter of an independent clause (not so for dependent clause). This thread has gone from a nit-fest to a nerd-fest real quick.

I love the song "Stairway to Heaven!!!"

I need some grammar (or maybe style) advice. If you are writing a formal letter to two couples, both with the the last name "Smith," how would you address it? My first (and only) instinct is this,

"Dear Messrs. and Mses. Smith,"

but I'm not sure. Thoughts?

Smithes's, ldo.

As a proper noun, Buffalo is a city; as a noun, it's an animal. In less common usage, it's a verb that means "to bully."

See Kill Bill volume 2 for an example of the less common usage: "I've never seen a gal buffalo Bill the way she buffaloed Bill."

"Ladies and Gentlemen:"

Grammar nits please help. This has come up a lot today because I like parentheses. Is it:

a) ... blah blah blah.)

of

b) ... blah blah blah).

I think it's a) but I keep doing b). Does it matter if it's an entire sentence in the parentheses? What about if it's just a sentence ending in an interjection in parentheses.

I'm surprised that, having gone through 344 posts, I've come up with a whole nother thing that drives me nuts.

See what I did there?

(I hope I didn't miss it somewhere else in the thread.)

This leads to another pet peeve of mine. Spaces after periods. There should be one. The tradition of using two spaces after periods comes from the era of typewriters and fixed width fonts. While those always had two spaces after a period, typeset material (with proportional fonts), always used a single space.

Today, everybody has proportional fonts. There's no reason to put two spaces after a period.

In addition, you'll notice that HTML always uses one space after period. If you put in extra spaces after periods, it won't display the second space. For example: two spaces. One space. See, no difference.

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/...ceorTwo03.html

Damn, should have known better than to grunch 4 pages. Good work.

Stewie touched on this (as well as irregardless) in Family Guy.

Also, how does one punctuate a question that ends in a quote that is a question.

e.g. Did the woman ask, "What time is it?"?

Delete the second question mark.

Depends on the example (and guidebook, I believe). In most cases the period goes outside of the parenthesis. (Although there are cases, as with a complete sentence, where it would be its own, self-contained thought, and thus the period would stay inside the parenthesis.)