The Grammar Thread

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The killer of grammar is social media and dumb phones, the language that is used now would be more at home in Bletchley or some secret service organisation. Everything is going downwards because no one cares and just accepts everything at face value and it then becomes the norm.

I care, and I absolutely refuse to use text speak when I use sms or whatsapp on my phone. It does have an effect too, neither of my daughters, nor their partners, use text speak to me or on our family groups. I just nagged them until they stopped 😁

On forums (fora?) I always proof read my post before hitting send too. It's not infallible but at least it usually makes sense. Which is more than can be said for a few posters here.

Jef
 
I find the way American vernacular is becoming the norm here irritating. Things like 'airplane' for aeroplane for example.

I recently emailed Cinch, the car buying company, about the ad they are running on TV.

I asked them, if it wasn’t too much trouble, to tell that bearded bloke who does their adverts that in America they say ‘Anyways’ while here in the UK we say ‘Anyway’. I got a very nice reply from Alannah from their Customer Service Team saying “Thank you very much for your email and for reaching out to cinch. I will pass on your feedback to the marketing team.”

Well, it gave my daughter a laugh 😁
 
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God I am the last person to be criticising anyone for poor grammar or spelling but I do sometimes see posts where I really do have to work hard at trying to understand what the person is saying, and given that were trying to “communicate” surely thats a serious issue. Often its a lack of punctuation or any attempt at sentence structure which throws me.
Steve.
 
Not grammar, but the common misuse of discrete instead of discreet can be amusing or annoying
not bovvered misself - you can tell by the context. I just happened to remember that discrete is the roughly the opposite of concrete and is spelt or was spelled the same way. But indiscreet is usually spelled 'indiscrete' - rarely used to mean 'not concrete'. Who cares anyway? :ROFLMAO:
PS In Moxon things are fpelled really ftrangely.
 
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In the US, the only people in grammar competitions are generally liberal arts majors and attorneys. That's not always the case. I work with a former math major who could organize 400 cats and make them march in order, and he wordsmiths my stuff pretty extensively.

Well, when someone loses an argument on an internet forum, they it's not uncommon in the states to see them pivot to grammar and punctuation.

Anecdotally, I've noticed that rank and file English folks can be or are generally more rabid about grammar, but doing anything improper in German will get more instant results from Germans.
 
I think the worst Americanism (in print) is 'coworker', should be 'co-worker', which sometimes they get right. The first time I came across it unhyphenated, I wondered what a ; 'cow orker' was! :unsure: :)
Yebbut not difficult to work out what coworker means; after all how many cow-orkers do you bump into on a daily basis?
 
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