Top 10 grammatical errors that make you look stupid

[onearmedbandit]

Noice way to treat your friends.

[gijoe1313]

I done proper speak good, it never did me no harm to mind my p's and q's and with them hoity-toity apostrophes' even! I never done nothing to anybody about correcting them on there grammar like. I was over their one day, watching my friend get dumberer, and I just had to do sumthink about it you know?

Sez I "Yous' want's to watch out fer that there mistake, their aint' nuffink no worserer then doing it all wrong like thats'!." And the cheek of it all, wuz he ain't never no thanked me fer all that effort Ive' putted into there learnings!
Just goe's to show you dat try'n to do good things' fer peoples, just ain't never worth the time!

[Big Dog]

Then I smack him in the face, sweep his legs out from under him, smash a potplant on his head then give him the Peoples Elbow to teach him some god damn grammar. Piece of shit.

Literally or figuratively?

[Trudes]

to, two, too, all different words meaning different things, they are not interchangeable!

[McJim]

to, two, too, all different words meaning different things, they are not interchangeable!

You forgot tutu.

e.g., She too took to two tutus!

[McJim]

I done proper speak good, it never did me no harm to mind my p's and q's and with them hoity-toity apostrophes' even! I never done nothing to anybody about correcting them on there grammar like. I was over their one day, watching my friend get dumberer, and I just had to do sumthink about it you know?

Sez I "Yous' want's to watch out fer that there mistake, their aint' nuffink no worserer then doing it all wrong like thats'!." And the cheek of it all, wuz he ain't never no thanked me fer all that effort Ive' putted into there learnings!
Just goe's to show you dat try'n to do good things' fer peoples, just ain't never worth the time!

Spoken like a true South Auckland english teacher!. Laughing my farken arse off buddy.

[Blackbird]

The only thing that REALLY gets to me is is something that even so-called journalists on the TV news screw up , and they of all people should know better. That's the incorrect use of "disinterested". E.g "the MP fell asleep in the debating chamber because he was disinterested". He fell asleep because he was uninterested FFS! Disinterested means unaffected by self-interest, or impartial.

Pedantic rant over, I'm off shopping

[Donor]

England speaked gud is kewl...

[Templar]

The dog wagged it's tail.
The dog wagged its tail. Suggests that more than one it got wagged. The tail is an appendage. Like the dog chewed bones tail.

Is it not supposed to be "The dog wagged its' tail."?

[MisterD]

Describing current activities with a past participle.

"Sat there in the corner."

I hate Coronation St.

Nowt wrong wi' that lad. It's perfectly acceptable Northern English dialect.
We conjugate that verb differently:
I'm sat
He's sat
.
.
I was sat etc etc


(Still hate Corrie though, for the record)

[Deviant Esq]

Is it not supposed to be "The dog wagged its' tail."?

Nup. The apostrophe in "it's / its" is only used to show that there is a letter / are letters missing - there are no letters missing there because it is a possessive in this case - and there are never any letters tacked on the end of "its" in any case. So the correct usage (however funny McJim thinks it looks... ) is "The dog wagged its tail."

[scumdog]

I also get pissed off with people who can't pronounce the letter R.

Car becomes Kah, Far becomes Fah. R is not meant to be silent. some pome with a speech impediment a couple of hundred years ago started a trend and a lot of dummies followed it.

Heigh ho

Not down here sunshine, - the buggers add the letter 'r' to words that don't even HAVE an 'r' - and add more to the ones that DO!!!

"Yerr, I seen thirrrteen or fourrrteen mallarrd drrrakes in the yellerrrr willeerrs overrr at the rriverrr on Thurrrsday so I drrove into town and brroughrt a new RRemngton"

[gijoe1313]

Spoken like a true South Auckland english teacher!. Laughing my farken arse off buddy.

Now that is a truly terrifying and fulsome prospect, which fills me with a sense of foreboding dread on an enigmatic scale! It is as if, a large patch of the neurons in my cranial space has undergone a depreciating surge of frenzy in its urge to transubstantiate that piece of information into a dark hole. All the better to preserve my sanity and mental well-being (which, as you know, was never quite all there to begin with!)

And as for me being a southern antipodean educational professional of human offspring in their formative teenage chronological existence, I have found that conversing with them in this manner of interminable terminology leaves much to be desired.

The more I do so, the more schadenfreude I garner - especially when I lash my charges with spelling tests (which, seem to be passe now - I am a relic of the old schooling system).

Cast your occular terriblis over this small encapsulation of the fecundity of words, with which I torment my beholden and captive audience through year 10 to year 12 :

authenticity (NCEA isn't)
bourgeoisie (those Kbers who know what all these words mean)
curmudgeon (only applicable to select KBers like Ixion, Hitcher, et. al)
dissemination (this always draws forth a giggle and "he said semen!")
exhilaration (what a student feels when he gets 11 out of 10 for Mr.Joe's spelling test)
feasibility (try juxtaposing this word next to NCEA)
gubernatorial (this way, we could actually shoot some of our politicians)
homogeneity (this always draws forth a giggle and "he said homo!")
instantiation (the board of trustees of schools seem to be filled with chimps, monkeys and other wildlife, sadly, representative of schooling with the metaphor as a zoo nowadays)
jeopardise (any chance of a fair and equitable education delievered across the whole of NZ)
kaleidoscope (what students incoherent answers and replies tend to be, the whole spectrum that makes one, weep, gnash and on occasion, yell for joy)
labyrinthian (the mind of a teenager at 8.50am)
masquerade (some students look twice as stupid as they appear to be)
necessity (is when I defenestrate a student to save our gene pool)
onomatopoeia (what students say when I wallop them with a thick dictionary)
paraphernalia (what I confiscate from students on a daily basis and turn into the police)
questionnaire (what I would love to give to some parents, but know it is a waste of time and paper since they have less faculties than their offspring)
reconnaissance (what my students do to see if Mr.Joe is in "one of those moods")
sacrilegious (that a student should actually study, practice and write a stunning piece of prose)
troglodyte (I refer to many of my class members as such)
unanimous (in my thoughts that too many little oiks aren't practicing spelling!)
visualisation (a day where all people of the word will use the Queen's English and not use the American "z" in their spelling!)
withdrawal (what happens to a student when I get done with them)
xylophone (what I play on student's heads when they misbehave)
zephyr (when students have been eating baked beans for breakfast)

Thank you dear audience for putting up with the cynical and post-withdrawal symptoms of being out of the gated community we loosely term "school". I shall endeavour to retardate my musings to a more informal KB manner.

[gijoe1313]

Not down here sunshine, - the buggers add the letter 'r' to words that don't even HAVE an 'r' - and add more to the ones that DO!!!

"Yerr, I seen thirrrteen or fourrrteen mallarrd drrrakes in the yellerrrr willeerrs overrr at the rriverrr on Thurrrsday so I drrove into town and brroughrt a new RRemngton"

I see you've been hobnobbing with the hoi-polloi of Invercargill again I see!

[Flatcap]

Nup. The apostrophe in "it's / its" is only used to show that there is a letter / are letters missing - there are no letters missing there because it is a possessive in this case - and there are never any letters tacked on the end of "its" in any case. So the correct usage (however funny McJim thinks it looks... ) is "The dog wagged its tail."

How about "The dog wagged his or her tail"...that's lovely flowing prose, and values her/him as a loved pet.