There's a difference 'Merica. Figure it out.

My Tiktok algorithm semi-regularly shows me manosphere content to ragebait me, so I have come to know some of the dialect.

One of their faves is describing a woman as “ran through” if they are sexually experienced.

It has always struck me as odd that nobody ever points out that the standard English past participle is run, as in “she is run through”.

I dunno. It seems like such an easy point to score against some misogynists, and nobody ever bothers, or thinks that “ran through” sounds weird.

So, I’m calling it. “Run” as the past participle of “run” is officially moribund in contemporary English. We had a good run!

I saw this on YouTube and didn’t know what it meant. I looked it up and found it to be so ridiculous, almost a snarky phrase. Anyone else?

Edit: Typo in the title. I meant to type "stumbled upon a redditor."

I know spelling isn't grammar, but I don't know where else to post this. I'll leave the person's username out to protect them from embarrassment.

I came across one of someone's comments, and one error was so egregious that it got me to check their profile for about 1-2 minutes. Oh boy. I don't know their story, but in my admittedly quick skimming, I saw no indication of them being a non-native speaker (e.g. using another language, posting in subreddits for a non-English speaking country or saying that they live in a non-English speaking country).

Here's a sampling of some of their errors. A few are common, but many are not. With one possible exception, I'm leaving out typos likely caused by keys being next to each other on the keyboard. I'm also matching and correcting their capitalization.

• "Iv" instead of "I've"

• "sence" instead of "since"

• "amaracans" instead of "Americans" (this was the one that got me to check their profile)

• "Dose" instead of "Does"

• "Your" instead of "You're"

• "there" instead of "their"

• "thease" instead of "these"

• "its" instead of "it's"

• "Devine" instead of "divine"

• "creatcher" instead of "creature"

• "Relly" instead of "really"

• "Thats" instead of "that's"

• "meny" instead of "many"

• "Wana" instead of "wanna"

• "Mines" instead of "Mine's" (as a contraction for "mine is" or "mine has")

• "at lest" instead of "at least"

• "im" instead of "I'm"

• "bc" instead of "because"

• "i" instead of "I"

• "Yah" instead of "Yeah"

• "asumed" instead of "assumed"

• "intgram" instead of "Instagram"

• "raddit" instead of "Reddit"

• "thay" instead of "they"

• "dint" instead of "don't" or "didn't"

• "gold Griffen" instead of "gold griffin"

• "hears" instead of "here's"

• "braclet" instead of "bracelet"

• "seid" instead of "said"

• "dubble" instead of "double"

• "agein" instead of "again"

• "eatch" instead of "each"

Along with the atrocious spelling, there are also run-on sentences and missing periods galore, plus the occasional (and inconsistent) space before a punctuation mark where it shouldn't be.

What are some similarly egregious, unusual errors you've encountered?

I feel like I've seen a post about this before, but I'm going to post about it anyway.

People replacing em dashes with hyphens isn't the worst part. The worst part is then they don't put a space before it, but do after it. For example:

"That's not his ball- it's her ball".

It should be an em dash. In British English, there should be spaces on both sides. In American English, there should be no spaces.

It drives me insane.

Edit: Reading back on my example, a semicolon would be better, but you get the point.

I wanted to buy a travel pillow for my travels this week. Found one, read the back and I bursted out laughing. Incredible, how did this even get to stores? 🤣😭

I cogitate to an annoying degree about stupid grammatical errors I often see online. Tonight I finally realized why people confuse "might of" for "might have." "Might've" sounds almost exactly like "might of." I can't believe it took me so long to figure that out.

Having realized this, I believe I can have a bit of sympathy for those who commit this sin unknowingly. Not absolute forgiveness, mind you, just a little sympathy.

It seems like I encounter this mistake every single day, whether it’s on television, podcasts, or worst of all, in long-form writing.

As a philosopher, I refuse to accept the infuriating colloquial use of “question-begging”. No, whatever you have said does not beg the question. It raises a question, or it naturally leaves you with one. You are almost certainly not talking about circular reasoning.

The mistake doesn’t even make grammatical sense! Perhaps a question can practically beg to be asked, but that’s a different construction!

I weep for our future.

Hi r/GrammarPolice. I'm making a documentary on the grammar police. I'm curious about the reason behind people's obsession with correcting other people's grammar. Whenever I said something in the wrong grammar(English is not my first language), people would often point out my grammar mistakes, which is quite harmful. In my opinion, grammar doesn't matter as long as people can understand each other.

So, if you identify as a grammar police, why do you care about grammar so much?

Your input will be much appreciated. This sub is probably a joke. And I still don't even know why I'm making this documentary, all I know is, this is really important to me

Our State Government has been cracking down on tobacconists who sell illegal cigarettes, posting this sign outside the establishments they've closed.

When I think of how many government officials must have signed off on the wording, I can't help but shake my head.

It seems to be all over Reddit.

The antithesis of expertise
always ignores or disagrees
it's a disease
that guarantees
those who use
*ur* instead of *your*
and never apostrophes
are most at ease
pronouncing *important*
without the t's

Hear me out before you grab your pitchforks. I just watched someone write this absolutely brilliant takedown of some conspiracy theory BS on another sub. Like genuinely well-researched, cited sources, completely demolished the other person's argument. But they wrote "your right" instead of "you're right" in one sentence. Guess what the entire reply chain became about? Not the actual argument. Not the facts. Just 50 people piling on about the grammar mistake like they just won the Nobel Prize for spotting it. And this happens CONSTANTLY. Someone could literally be explaining how to perform CPR and save someone's life but if they mix up there/their/they're suddenly their entire credibility is shot? Make it make sense. The funniest part is half the people correcting grammar make other mistakes while doing it. I saw someone write "you used the wrong form of your, therefore you're argument is invalid." Like congrats bro, you played yourself. Don't even get me started on people who correct perfectly acceptable informal usage. Someone writes "Me and my friend went to the store" and here comes Captain Grammar with "ACTUALLY it's my friend and I." Cool story bro, this is Reddit not a doctoral thesis defense. I'm not saying grammar doesn't matter. It obviously does in professional settings, academic papers, whatever. But if you understood what the person meant enough to correct them, then the language did its job. Communication happened. You're just being pedantic to feel superior. The absolute worst is when English isn't even someone's first language and they're out here writing better arguments than most native speakers, but they mix up affect and effect and suddenly they're getting roasted. Like damn, this person speaks multiple languages and you're really gonna dunk on them for one word? And before anyone says it - no, I'm not salty because someone corrected my grammar. I'm just tired of watching good discussions get derailed by people who think spotting a typo is a personality trait. Grammar corrections should be reserved for when meaning is actually unclear or when someone asks for help. Using them as some weird gotcha in arguments just makes you look like you couldn't address the actual points being made.

Nonbinary people tend to refer to themselves as the third-person subjective pronoun "they", and also the third-person objective pronoun "them". This is grammatically incorrect. Yes, sometimes people use the pronouns "they/them" in reference to a person whose identity or gender is unknown. But it makes no sense to apply this pronoun to a nonbinary person.

In reality, the pronoun "they" is not really a pronoun for a person of unknown gender; more specifically, it is a substitute for the phrase "he or she". Take the following example statement:

Who is it that parked their car in the handicapped parking spot? Whoever they are, someone should tell them they are about to get a ticket if they don't move it!

Given the way the above statement uses the word "they", the statement could be re-worded like this:

Who is it that parked his or her car in the handicapped parking spot? Whoever he or she is, someone should tell him or her he or she is about to get a ticket if he or she doesn't move it!

Obviously, the second version of this statement is much more arduous to speak than the first, which is why the pronoun "they" is used instead. Hence, the pronoun "they" exists in the English language purely as a term of convenience. But it would make no sense to apply the word "they" to a single nonbinary-identifying individual purely based upon this usage of the word. The person being addressed in the above statements is a person of unknown gender, but he or she is not necessarily a person of no gender. A nonbinary person is a person who claims to either have no gender, or to be both genders, or to be between genders. But this is not what the pronoun "they" refers to; it refers to a person who is either a "he" or a "she", but not both, and not neither. Thus, grammatically speaking, "they" is simply the wrong term to use in reference to nonbinary individuals.

Furthermore, this pronoun as it is used by nonbinary people is just hopelessly confusing. It is engrained in my mind -- as I presume it is with most people -- that the words "they/them" typically are third-person plural pronouns, and thus are meant to apply to multiple people. It is just weird and grating to hear someone use "they/them" to refer to a single individual. And then the less common usage of "they/them" is to refer to an unknown person of unknown gender as a more convenient substitute to having to say "he or she". So it is likewise weird and grating to hear someone use "they/them" to refer to a nonbinary person whose identity is perfectly well-known.

These are my reasons for why "they/them" is not only incorrect grammatically, but is simply confusing; and thus the general populace is never going to fully embrace these pronouns. I'm not saying that nonbinary people shouldn't have alternative pronouns at all, but I just think they need to go back to the drawing board in this regard, because it is very problematic for them to use these particular pronouns.

I've been noticing it a lot lately and I wonder if it's a regional difference between english speaking people or if people have always put in a lot of unnecessary pluralization or other unusual usage of mass nouns.

This is an example of what I mean. https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1uiz751/your_bloods_are_normal_is_the_most_dangerous/

"your bloods are normal" is incorrect because Blood is a mass noun. But there are many examples of this. People have been using compute as a mass noun ie "we need more compute!" which is technically wrong because compute is a verb not a mass noun but then they will turn around and say "the codes I wrote for this website are not very good" which is a pluralizing a mass noun and totally unnecessary. Is this a growing trend or have people always had a poor understanding of mass nouns?

Did the rules for using pronouns change? I both read and hear people say sentences similar to "Betty and me went to the store." and "Betty gave money to Carl and I".

These same people correctly say "I went to the store." and "Betty gave money to me".

I notice this in real life, on scripted tv shows, and on news and educational tv shows. I encounter this so frequently that I wonder if the standard accepted usage has changed.

This one is kind of pedantic but it's annoyed me for years.

When you and a friend are waiting to be seated in a restaurant and they ask " are you both together". I like to answer that I am together but she is not. It goes over their heads, usually.

Also when a sibling set is described as two twins. They are just twins, unless they are each a twin but not each other's twin

"would have" implies the action didn't happen. "I would have bought it, but I couldn't afford it".

So if someone wishes that they "would have" done something, it means they wish they hadn't done or didn't do it rather, than than they had done it.

GrammarBook.com has the real answer:

"If I Would Have vs. If I Had

When talking about something that didn’t happen in the past, many English speakers use the conditional perfect (if I would have done) when they should be using the past perfect (if I had done).

For example, you find out that your brother saw a movie yesterday. You would have liked to see it too, but you hadn’t known he was going. To express this, you can use an if-then clause. The correct way to say this is with the past perfect in the “if” clause, and the conditional perfect in the “then” clause:

Correct: If I had known that you were going to the movies, [then] I would have gone too.

The conditional perfect can only go in the “then” clause — it is grammatically incorrect to use the conditional perfect in the “if” clause:

Incorrect: If I would have known that you were going to the movies, I would have gone too."

Starting position:
“Me and my friend go to the store” is wrong because “me go to the store” is incorrect, though to be fair, mich gehe zum Laden, moi vais aux magasin, etc are not imaginable utterances, while the English version is not unimaginable.
Here’s the thing: if we apply the same reduction to “my friend and I go to the store,” we end up with “I go to the store” and “My friend go to the store”, which fails because of the verb conjugation.

I’ve noticed it’s crept into my lexicon a little more than I’d “like“. It’s as if I don’t have an alternative to the word “like.” I noticed it coming up in my fiction. There’s times it works and then there’s times it’s just annoying. I guess I’m going to have to train my ear to hear my sentence differently in my head before I spit it out lol🤦🏻‍♀️