General Chat

I hear a lot of young people using "like" numerous times when trying to explain something.
I believe a lot of this lack of grammar is due to American TV shows .

DERMOT!!!!! :-P :-P :-P :-P :-P

Hear this all the time.....something being different to something else.
Said it myself as a youngster and can still hear my dad correcting me in no uncertain terms. Different FROM not different TO. Way to remember he told me...similar to...different from. Assuming he was right, I reckon the grammar he was taught in the 1920s went deeper than the stuff I ever learnt at school.

'So, a while back one of the contestants on Frank Skinner’s ‘Room 101’ chose the word ‘so’ as her pet hate. So she didn’t mean the word ‘so’ in every use and context, only the way that people had started to use 'so' at the beginning of a sentence, in response to a question.

By adding ‘so’ in this fashion she reckoned they sounded incredibly patronising. So ever since then, all I can hear is people answering questions with sentences starting with ‘so’. It’s driving me crazy. So at first I tried to put it down to being simply that phenomenon when you think of something and then can’t stop spotting it.

So the next time you hear somebody giving an explanation starting with ‘so’, remove the word in your mind and see if their sentence suffers in the slightest.

I don’t think so'.

.....and the oh, so pretentious, who start a sentence with 'So' :-|

There are times when it's okay, like 'So, how are you?'
But when asked how to peel a potato, the instructions don't begin with 'So'.

Just heard one that annoys me

very unique

It's either unique or it isn't it can't be very unique ...........grrr :-0

"absolutely" - for me, this has become the most irritating word in the English language - everyone seems to say it :-S

Doesn't free mean free of charge? So, how can anything be supplied for free (of charge) ?

I do have a bit of a problem with apostrophes. When I gave my mind a good beating once I found that my totally accurate spelling was no more and my memory of correct use of apostrophes were very sketchy.

You're right about it never leaving you Sharron. I'm neurotic about the use of the apostrophe. It was almost the first lesson when I started grammar school at age 10 because there were three apostrophes in the name of the school!

I have been asked the point of punctuation by various people on the lines of "you don't need commas to understand the meaning" so I always write down

"Woman without her man is nothing"

and ask them the meaning. Then I put in some punctuation

"Woman! without her, man is nothing"

which completely reverses the meaning.

I hate "bored of..." I know it is generally accepted nowadays but I was taught "bored with.." Don't even get me started on less and fewer........

Pedantic misery ain't I? :-D

:-D :-D :-D

Somebody once said I was the only person they had ever heard who always swore with correct grammar, even when I was drunk.

:-D
When I went back to school in the 1990s to study A level English I was with several other adults in a 6th form class.

We had an exam and also had to hand in a project around the same time. The teacher saw us 1 by 1 in his room to talk over our first 6 months on the course. I went in, sat down and the first words he said were - "You're grammar school educated aren't you".

He said my standard of English and the way I'd read through my exam paper several times before I started writing showed how I'd been taught. He then told me I was the only one who'd got the sentiment of the poem we had to read in the exam correct. I'd taken my time reading it through. Did you get taught the same about exams, read once - panic. Read twice - realise you could complete a few of the questions. Read third time - realise you could answer most. Calm down and start.

You're so right it never does leave you, my OH is the same. My pet hate is reading or listening to news - someone tell the news writers to look at their tenses, since when has a story that's several hours/days old been told in present tense, has past tense vanished? :-S
:-D :-D

ONLY LIKED ART AND HISTORY.
BEST ART TEACHER WENT TO ITALY
TEACH AND HISTORY TEACHER WAS MORE INTERESTED
IN YOUR HANDWRITING ALWAYS SLOPED FORWARD,

...and I bet you never said, nor say, 'should of' :-D

I had many, many of those days. Didn't like it, went somewhere else.


It wasn't a day though. We just did not get away with incorrect use of English.

I never have said ' off of' again since Miss Rowe heard me.

OH HECK DON'T READ ANY OF MINE,NEVER DID GRAMMAR,THINK IT MUST HAVE BEEN ON A DAY
WHEN I DID'T GO TO SCHOOL.

A daughter now in her early fifties told me once that she never heard the word "grammar" until she began French aged about 11! And even her generation never had the exercises of "parsing" and "precis".

OH once told me (after he received a set of particularly daft intelligence tests for use in recruiting staff) that "précis" would be his idea of a good intelligence test

Grrrrr!!
I can't identify a noun, adverb etc, any more, but I know where they go in a sentence.
I also know where to use fewer, less etc.
I have a bugbear about reporters saying things like - 'The dog, who....' and 'The person that......'

I totally agree Sharron....not much attention given to grammar these days.
:-S

I had what I was always told was the benefit of a 1960s grammar school education.

It never quite leaves and has me worrying as to whether my punctuation and grammar are spot on, even when I am cursing and swearing.

Last night I quite had the vapours when I heard a headmaster (should that contain a hyphen?), no less, talk about the AMOUNT of people doing something.

I hear Miss Rowe quietly turning!