I just want to take a little time to share an experience that has gotten me thinking of a few grammar mistakes that make me cringe. A week or so ago in GIS class we were learning how to manipulate rasters. You don't need to know what that means; all you need to know is that rasters can in some ways be treated like numbers, and two rasters can be added together, subtracted from one another, multiplied together, or divided by each other. With this in mind, you'd expect that when accessing a list of operations available to manipulate rasters, you'd see "Add", "Subtract", "Multiply", and "Divide" in the list. You'd be wrong. What you'd find instead are "Plus", "Minus", "Times", and "Divide". Even worse, the progress window will say something like "Performing Minus on raster blah blah blah."
This sort of talk is annoying enough when it comes from junior high kids, but it really gets to me finding it in a professional program. Any time I hear someone say "You're supposed to times those numbers together", I just want to grab them by the collar, shake them violently, and say "It's multiply, you idiot, MULTIPLY!" You see, you can multiply numbers, but you can't times them. Saying "four times five" means you have the quantity five, but you have it four times over. "Four times five" is the same as "four multiplied by five", but there's no such thing as "four timesed by five". You have no idea how hard it is even to write it wrong.
So that's one thing. My other biggest grammar pet peeve is the misuse of "you and I". I'm pretty sure this started out a generation or so ago, with far too many kids saying "Billy and me are going to the playground", and their parents/teachers appropriately correcting them, saying "You mean 'Billy and I' are going." These kids grew up thinking that "him and me" was never appropriate, and that "he and I" was always appropriate.
Unfortunately, this has led to a whole generation, my generation, saying things like "Mrs. Williams gave Sarah and I a Wal-Mart gift card for our anniversary." This is very wrong, and I cringe every time I hear an example of it. The correct way is "gave Sarah and me". How can you tell when to use which? It's easy. Just think the sentence as if it only applied to yourself. In this example, that means saying "Mrs. Williams gave I a gift card." Does that sound right? Only if you're a Rastafarian. "Mrs. Williams gave me a gift card" does sound right, so me works. On the other hand, does "Me got a gift card from Mrs. Williams" sound right? Only if you're a caveman. "I got a gift card" sounds much better. It all depends on who is doing the action, and whom the action is being performed toward. (See what I did there? I did a dangling participle! No, they're not incorrect.) So, to review, you can say "She and I received a package in the mail", or you can say "A package came for her and me." In the first sentence, "She and I" are acting, and in the second, the package is doing the acting (grammatically speaking).
Another that deserves a paragraph or two: "less" vs. "fewer". I often hear people say things such as "There sure are a lot less people here this time than last time!" Interestingly, I don't think I've ever heard anyone misuse "fewer". "Less" is used if the subject of measurement is continuous, such as a volume of water. You'd never say "There's fewer water in the lake this year." You'd say "There's less water in the lake." "Fewer" is used for discontinuous data, like people. I've rarely seen a fraction of a person; usually they come whole. So to return to the first example, you fix that by saying "There sure are a lot fewer people here this time than last time!" Much better.
One more major, major irritant: "would of". I think this comes from hearing people contract "would have" to "would've", and writing it down the way it sounds. Hearing it is bad enough, but seeing it typed makes my brain want to leap out of my skull and hide under a desk. You'd think that once a person types that, they'd think to themselves, "Hmm. Would of... the 'would of what'? What is a 'would', and what might it be of? I thought it should be 'would have'." Then, of course, it would click, and they'd understand. Apparently this doesn't happen very often, though.
Those are my four biggest grammar pet peeves, especially in speech. There are plenty of other irritants, such as "effect" vs. "affect", proper apostrophe use (it's vs. its, using an apostrophe for a plural such as "egg's", etc.), confusing homonyms (there vs. their vs. they're, to vs. two vs. too, etc.), and using adjectives in place of adverbs ("don't take it personal" vs. "don't take it personally")... you get the idea. Oh, "If only I would have known" is incorrect, while "If only I had known" is okay.
Oh, yeah, and while "irregardless" is actually a word, it doesn't mean what people who use it think. It has both a negative prefix and a negative suffix, which cancel each other out. Basically, it means "without irregard", which is the same thing as regarding something. It is always used when the speaker really means to simply say "regardless". One of these days I will manage to use "irregardless to" in a sentence to mean "in regard to", and it will be awesome.
Anyway, I would blame elementary school teachers for this whole issue, but then I realize that they made it through college making these mistakes and are now passing them on to children. So instead, I blame elementary education programs at universities. It is at that level that change can be effected.*
Okay, I'm done being a grammar Nazi now.
*If you think I just used "effect" wrong... think again. It's a verb in that sentence, not a noun. How do you "affect change"? Make it a different kind of change? Melt pennies into copper slag?
