Asparagus, I can't help myself... but the grammar geek in me just has to point out that "y'all" is a contraction, not a conjugation...

Now y'all(yep, I know it too) know why I don't post much from my PDA. It's a PITA to use the FN button all the time and it can be difficult to tell the difference between ' and , on it. The _ and - look the same also.

Oh gosh I love this thread. I'm so glad there are others like me on the board.

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LOL - guilty! Haha.

ofourse4 - ikt don't coun t when yo9ur wering 2in HAloween finge4rmails.

The lose or loose problem is much worse than you think. It was so bad that we actually programmed the forum to replace instances of loose + weight with lose + weight Really, try to post it!

lose weight - didn't work!

Oh my goodness! That's fantastic that there's a grammar block on this message board for loosing weight.

Honestly, the only thing that bothers me is when people switch up homophones or when people conjugate verbs incorrectly. I expect punctuation errors and run-on sentences on a message board because I think people are typing the way that they would speak in casual conversation.

We had a long conversation on another message board I belong to - years ago - about this and someone came up with the description of tuxedo conversation vs. t-shirt conversation. I love the phrases; I think they're very apt.

Tuxedo conversation is what you write at the office or what you speak when you're talking in a business situation. T-shirt conversation is what you write in emails to friends, on message boards, and when you are just talking to your buddies.

I write on message boards much the way I talk in casual conversation ... which is why I use lots of dashes, ellipses, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, etc. My writing (to a large extent) mimics my vocal/speech patterns. (There's also the element that I was raised overseas, so sometimes I get mixed up with punctuation and some spellings because I tend to switch back and forth between British grammar and American grammar.)

However, while message board writing is t-shirt conversation, there are still certain things that make me cringe when I see them - not because I think anyone should be perfect on a message board, but because there are some things that are clearly not typos or that people use repeatedly that show that they really *don't* know the correct version.

And to be honest my "snobbery" is not so much about *them* and what they know or don't know, as an overall sadness that educational standards have fallen that low. It's SO EASY to know the difference between "your" and "you're" ... but SO MANY people don't know it. That should be basic knowledge and no one should get that wrong. Same with "there" and "they're." Or knowing that not every "s" ending needs an apostrophe before it.

Oh, and one final thing - I HATE (loathe, despise) texting jargon used on a message board or in email. I text plenty and use the appropriate abbreviations then, but on a message board, if someone consistently uses things like "ur" and "b4" and other texting abbreviations, I'll stop reading their posts. It annoys me that much.

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Ooh Oooh! :bounce: this is my first chance to vent about some peeves I have with my DH's speech habits.

I love him to death, and I have to really bite my tongue when he does this. Yes, I sometimes fail and correct him. I don't think it will really change the way he talks but I sometimes find myself doing it before I realize I'm speaking.

1. His refusal to use soft G's. the name "Giles" becomes "Guiles" and the word gist "guist".

2. His reference to finding a good "lot" to park in. They are parking spaces! The "lot" is what the spaces are found in.

Petty? Yes. Nitpicky? Heckyes. I don't make a fuss, but I've never really vented about it either. Hopefully, next time it happens, I'll be a lot more cheerful about it and not have to work so hard to keep myself from correcting him.

I don't mind grammatical/spelling errors online, but it gets on my nerves when I see them in a newspaper, etc...the way I see it, if you're paid to write, you should brush up on your English skills!

tera- my husband has some of these that drive me crazy. i honestly think some of them he does to drive me crazy... when we were first together we were moving furniture and he wanted me to unplug something - but he kept saying "plug it out!" and i had no idea what he was saying or what he wanted and it ended up in a fight. plug it out. puh!

LOL, I had a friend who used to call them parkings. As in "Oh, there's a good parking." Or, "I hope there's good parkings."

Ok I will just make a confession... I used to use the word boughten, I actually thought it was a word. now I cant even figure out how I used it because it doesnt even sound right... and I used to think a lot was one word .. oh well I guess nobody is perfect I am sure that I make a lot of other errors too....opps

I have to admit I was a huge spelling snob, especially with the homonyms, to/too/two - they're/their/there... and my personal hugest peeve - of instead of have or 've - I would of gone with you. I never had to think twice about which one to use. Then I lost me spelling ability.

I didn't really lose it. If I concentrate, it's still there (luckily for husband - as he asks me to spell at least three words every day). But cognitive problems are often part and parcel of fibromyalgia, and for me that means short term memory problems (forgetting entire conversations as if they never occured, and constantly losing things - and finding them in odd places like the remote in the freezer) and a tendency to use phonetic spellings. I caught myself the other day writing tue instead of two (maybe because I had just written tuesday).

It sort of feels like I've lost my mind, and I've got a rental instead (and a beater at that). I mean I never had to give spelling a second thought. If I made a mistake it was generally a word I was unfamiliar with completely (in which case, I usually looked it up) or a true typo caused by a slip of the finger (in handwritten script I've always had a very odd tendency to sometimes switch a terminal d with a g as in bang instead of band, when really tired - now this happens even more easily - weird).

Fibromyalgia is a neurotransmitter disorder, so I'm guessing my brain is just misfiring and connections that used to be there aren't being made, at least not by the same route. It's not quite an aphasia, but it's given me a glimpse of what that might be like. My visual spelling is still intact - so I find most of my errors with proofreading (the problem is I used to be so good, I never thought of proofreading, so I need to remind myself to do it). Now I feel like I'm grading someone else's paper (and whoever it belongs to is an idiot).

I wish I could say it gives me a lot more patience with others - instead I have a little more patience with others, and a little more patient with myself (but it still bugs me way more than it should).

Drives me nuts too. Nearly all of my edits are because, even though I proof what I read, once it's posted I see more typos and such. My biggest pet peeve is when people do not captialize the G in God. Not as in 'gods' but as in 'God'.