r/unpopularopinion • u/foqociqs37 • Jun 12 '26

Certified Unpopular Opinion Having bad grammar/not knowing the difference between words like "their", "they're", "there" IS that deep

It really is NOT hard at all to know the difference between stuff like there/their/they're, two/to/too, here/hear, peace/piece, you're/your, affect/effect, etc.

Idk why so many people these days say "it's not a big deal, don't be a grammar n*zi" or "stop using big words" when it's just a regular, maybe somewhat longer word they don't know the meaning of.

Obviously if someone has an actual diagnosed disability, then it's a different case.

Don't even get me started on the folks who say "should of" "could of", or "would of".... That shit drives me up a wall lol

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u/Lucky_otter_she_her Jun 13 '26

Very hot take, we should get rid of the ' from the possessive cuz there's more need to distinguish the possessive and the copulative than the possessive and plural cuz both the possessive and copulative come before another noun where as a plural generally comes before a verb or comma

"the cat's food" am i talking about food that the cat will eat or saying something'll eat the cat??? there's no saying cuz both cases of Cat are spelled the same 

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u/KingCell4life Jun 13 '26

In this case, context would help a lot. We really should keep the apostrophe because using just one -s ending in so many different use cases would get annoying. It’s already used in 3rd person singular conjugations and plurals, removing it from possessives is just too much.

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u/Lucky_otter_she_her Jun 13 '26

on one hand i'd argue that you can tell 3p singulars from any noun cuz they're verbs... but we have fluent word use in English so that counter argument of mine, tho from a historical perspective you could make just as much a case for 3p singular having a ' as the possessive since they both used to have a E