Why are these no stickies thread?

Oh and why is no constant misuse of than and then mentioned yet? This tilts me kinda hard and I am not even native speaker...

Here here!

(j/k, I know it's "hear hear." I just wanted to add yet another common mistake)

My grandpa would always give birthday cards that said on the cover...

to "Greg"

i vaguely remember a friend telling me that he saw a negative article about "eats, shoots and leaves." whoever wrote it tore the book apart for its myriad errors in grammar.

if anyone knows where to find this, i would appreciate a link. looking down on people who purport to be experts is a passion of mine.

edit: found it. <3 the new yorker and <3 louis menand
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...628crbo_books1

"Noone" usually receives this response from me:



Penny arcade has a couple great punctuation bits:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/20...f-punctuation/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/11/03/

Does anyone else text with proper grammar? I use apostrophes and everything when texting, it just kills me to send the word "I'll" without it, as it just looks like "lll" on the phone.

Nested parentheses (note correct pluralization (also, punctuation goes after the close parenthesis))?

The one thing I never worry about is ending a sentence with a preposition, unless I'm being a jackass. I have yet to hear an explanation that makes any real sense to me.

Also, how about putting punctuation inside quotes? I see that screwed pretty often.

"Like this?"

"Yes," I replied.

I feel like this thread was made for me. Unfortunately I have nothing to contribute at this time since "noone" and the overuse of question marks has been covered.

The people that drive me insane at work are the ones that can speak normally but send emails to the department that look like this:

printer by the conference room broken again somebody call help desk or should i

I can't take that ****. It's like they flip the stupid switch on their brains only for times when typing is required.

I'm always surprised at how many people think "heighth" is a word. They say it more often then they write it.

I see what you did there. Hope I'm not the only one.

You mind as well start a thread on spelling the word definately. Garenteed to please.

Honestly Private Joker I could care less about this thread.

the possessive apostrophe leaves me flummoxed. For years, I've always written things like "Let's get in John's car" but shouldn't it really be "Johns' car?" And then throw in the possessive "its" and I have no clue whether or not it should be "The movie was long - its' length was over two hours" or should you just do away with the apostrophe?

At least I understand not use the contraction "it's" unless I mean "it is!"

Holy **** I just came in my pants.

I have always understood the phrase "with regards to" (as opposed to "regarding") to be improper in the sense that less is usually more in composition, so it tilts me pretty hard that "WRT" is pretty widespread on here and apparently used quite frequently in some fields.

It should definitely be "John's car." When the possessor ends in an 's' has always made me mad until recently when I discovered that apparently both ways are acceptable (e.g., you can say either "Jonas's car" or "Jonas' car"). I'm still not entirely sold on this.

Haha, nice.

How about something like the phrase "moot point", which originally meant something was open or up for discussion, but is now used by 99% of the people in the world to indicate the opposite? I usually want to say something when it comes up, but always figure its not worth it, much like irregardless whenever its uttered.

I would also accept "mute point", or "moo point".

Any other similar examples? I'm surely unwittingly guilty of alot of them.

Good to know so many of you are jumping on the "could/couldn't care less" and the "definitely/definately" train. "Mine/mind/might as well" is another good one, catalyst.

Dom --

Quick lesson: when something is possessive and uses the apostrophe + s, then think of the item belonging to whatever is before the apostrophe. So if it's John's car, that means it's the car that belongs to John. If the car belongs to John's mother and his father, then it's his parents' car. The apostrophe is after the 's' because the car belongs to both his parents, not just one parent.

Other examples: "The public's decision" "the voters' rights" and "this particular voter's ballot was lost"

As for the its/it's thing, think of it as a category in itself.

"It's" is only used as a contraction meaning "it is."
"Its" is only and always used as possessive. "It's a good movie, but its script is cliched in spots."

This was a selection on our customer facing support site a few months ago:

"I need data a restoral from backup."

I'm still trying to figure out how someone wrote that and how it passed through several sets of eyes before getting published.

It's/its is so goddamned easy that I think that's the main reason it bothers me. So easy.

Anyway, I'm sure us grammar nerds all agree that whenever we're debating something and we see someone with an opposite viewpoint make the really simple your/you're or their/there mistake, we smugly conclude that we are correct because we're not as stupid as they are.

Am I the only one that has noticed that 'should of' and 'should have' are not the same thing?

I could care less is usually sarcasm imo.

Also, I always thought of moot point as something that was debatable but largely irrelevant to question at hand, such that debating it would be little more than an intellectual exercise.

According to Strunk & White you can only leave the "s" off the end of possessive-nouns-ending-in-s when the noun in question is an important Biblical figure. So you can write "Jesus' car" or "Mosses' car" but not "Jonas' car". It should be "Jonas's car."

so the thread title error is there for comedic effect, or is it the ultimate irony?

Agreed. Not only that, it should be encouraged and expected. I don't think enough people care about it.