Misused English

[shanex]

I'm not a grammar Nazi. I don't care if you miss a comma or if you should have used a semicolon. I don't care if you misspell a word or two. I get a little annoyed at they're/their/there screw-ups and it's/its confusions but not enough to comment on them

Comments

[aurelia_star]

I am totally with you on all of these.

I will resist the urge to comment with an incorrect use of all of these...

(It's Emily, from the New Years Party, by the way!)

~Emily

[shanex]

Hi there!

Sorry for my profound laziness in not friending you earlier. There was also incompetence. I didn't even remember how, so I had to figure that out first. As you can see from the dates on my posts, I rarely LJ at all.

-ATW

[xiphias]

I tend to say "You can't eat your cake and have it, too", which, to me, seems to get the point across better.

I did say, once, "I was going to tell that person [this thing], but I literally choked."

By that, I meant that, as I was about to start speaking, I somehow inhaled something, and started coughing so much that I couldn't talk. So I had to explain that I had literally meant "literally".

When you have to clarify that you're meaning "literally" to mean "literally", it rather loses its usefulness as a word.

My pet peeve is people who use "enormity" to mean "enormousness". An "enormity" is a great evil of a scope that is difficult to comprehend. It's a useful word to have: you need something to be able to explain the 9/11 attacks, Darfur, and so forth -- a category that helps you conceptualize them. Conceptualizing, by naming and defining, helps humans deal with things. Diluting the meaning of "enormity" hurts society as a whole by removing a tool that we have to emotionally and mentally deal with the worst things in human

myriad is both a noun and an adjective

[jbaltz]

Just stumbled across this post, but myriad comes from the Greek myrioi meaning 'ten thousand'. It's a fine noun.

vis http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myriad, especially:

usage Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.