17 Comments
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Theresa Taylor's avatar

A very dear, and no longer with us, internet friend who was a teacher loved getting into online "battles", especially when it came to politics. She was a rather smart cookie and watching her engage, while correcting people's grammar, was beyond entertaining (especially with her cousin, Linda, who was a real speshul kind of speshul). That being said... my education, through 5th grade, was in German schools. There was a little bit of Spanish thrown in for preK through 1st grade (Mexico City) and some English (MD) for 2nd and 3rd, and the rest total German immersion. I'm not 100% perfect when it comes to grammar, but I know I'm a hella better than a lot of people my not-so-traditional schooling notwithstanding. And this sign... it hurts my brain. It hurts my eyes.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

I want to visit this place with a paintbrush. But I will not. And what a fascinating education you had! Mine was pretty humdrum.

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April's avatar

Apostrophes for plural words (and numbers, like 1980s) are my personal grammar hangup, too. Cringy. That and sentence fragments inartfully dividing a perfectly fine sentence. (see what I did there) I created special "Quick Notes" for these on Turntin for grading paper :)

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Susan Campbell's avatar

Ha. Yes. Absolutely yes.

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Jeannette LeSure's avatar

Ive no irrelavant remark's to add in addition to tho'se I been reading already?

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Susan Campbell's avatar

Well done.

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Doug Hardy, CTNewsJunkie's avatar

Goodwyn's Furniture & Extra Punctuation, LTD.

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Doug Hardy, CTNewsJunkie's avatar

Goodwyns Furniture. And with all those extra apostrophes floating right there on the sign right below it.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

Yeah. I was going to guess the last name isn't Goodwyns.

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Jeff Schult's avatar

My family moved away from New Jersey when we were JUST about to start to learn to diagram sentences. We arrived in Pennsylvania, where they'd just finished learning all that stuff. That's my excuse, or was when I bothered having one.

I generally know when something is wrong or might be, I suppose. But I never know what it's called.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

And I moved to learn New Math at just the wrong time. That's my excuse, too.

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Rich Colbert's avatar

Reflecting back on my various English classes (that’s what we called them back in my day when Moby Dick was a sardine) I think most of my teachers sought perfection over creativity thereby stifling original thought. There is much more to teaching/learning that dotting i’s and crossing t’s.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

I agree completely. One of my favorite high school teachers was an English teacher (we called it that, too) and I don't remember her ever correcting grammar so much as encouraging us to think.

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Thomas Dombroski's avatar

I have always passed at making comments about the spelling or punctuation or any other Englishy stuff

But I do have a pet peeve

My job for almost 40 years would often require me to set up jobs on a turntable

We would have a worksheet that would give us all the parameters to complete the set up

It would include the RPM for the turntable

Sometimes it might be a 30 second rpm and it would say twice around , so you would set the timer for a minute

Occasionally we would get a 50 rpm twice around

I would come in to find that the timer was set for a minute and I would ask why they did that ??

They would say 50 and 50 is 100

It always made my day when I would inform them that while 50 and 50 is indeed 100 , 50 seconds plus 50 seconds isn’t 1:00

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Susan Campbell's avatar

That's a valid pet peeve, I think.

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User's avatar
Comment deleted
Jul 10, 2023
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Susan Campbell's avatar

I have the same issue. It's not hatred. It's grammar, and I tell myself that clinging to grammatical rules at the expense of someone's personhood is not cool, but I have to remind myself how to use "they" in that context.

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