Grammar and spellling that make you twitch

[Twik]

Dogs are sometimes skittish, not skiddish.

Dogs on linoleum floors can be very skiddish, actually.

[hobish]

Everything listed above, and add...per se.  It's per se.  Not persay.  Makes me nuts.

I worked in dog rescue for many years.  You would think people would know that it's a German (or Australian :-) ) shepherd, not shepard.  Dogs are sometimes skittish, not skiddish.  The female has a litter of puppies, not puppys.  After they're weaned, she'll need to be spayed, not spade, before she can be adopted.

I have heard "spaded" as well. The dog was spaded after she had puppies. Ouchy.

[amylouky]

Oh, forgot my favorite one.. "Viola!"

No. A viola is a musical instrument. The word you are looking for is voila (and yes, the a should be accented, I just don't know how to make that on my keyboard).

Under absolutely no circumstances, ever, should it be "Walla!"

[lowspark]

Voilą!

[Twik]

I don't know, I love to imagine someone responding to "Viola!" with "Cello!"

[amylouky]

Voilą!

Showoff. 

[lowspark]

 

[sunnygirl]

• Oogle instead of ogle. Oogle isn't a word.

I think it should be a word, though. It has a great sound.

Not exactly a grammar/spelling error but I hate "blippable", which comes from a brand name and means a certain kind of interactive marketing. Just because I think "blippable" sounds adorable and should mean something much nicer than it does.

I hate it when people insist that only British or American spelling/grammar is correct and the other incorrect. They are both correct; they are just geographic variables!

Also when people use semicolons before conjunctions. Donna Tartt, who is otherwise one of my favourite writers, does this a lot.

[jaxsue]

Lightning versus lightening. Lightening is the act of making something brighter or paler. Lightning is zappy electricity from the sky. If somebody is "struck by lightening", I don't expect him to be hurt.   

That's one of mine, too! I've seen it spelled "lightening" in professional publications. Grrr.

[jaxsue]

I wish all those people getting pregnate would stop breeding.

Ha! 

[jaxsue]

Reading comments on news stories can be entertaining or enraging, depending on your mood. I saw a funny one this week: kilt. As in, killed.

[menley]

Oh, forgot my favorite one.. "Viola!"

No. A viola is a musical instrument. The word you are looking for is voila (and yes, the a should be accented, I just don't know how to make that on my keyboard).

Under absolutely no circumstances, ever, should it be "Walla!"

This one KILLS me. I see it on dozens of blogs.

[kelly_jeanie]

I often see this when people are selling clothing -

Stripped instead of striped
Piled instead of pilled

Abbreviations I've seen that don't seem like much of a time saver, and are just plain wrong -

Hossy instead of hospital
Ressie instead of reservation

I'd make commentary but I fear I'd fall in violation of Muphry's Law (if I haven't already!).

[Onyx_TKD]

Definately.
...
Capitalizing the first letter of every word, or every other letter. Especially irritating when you're trying to roleplay and one of the participants will not stop typing like that.

"Definately" as a typo for "definitely" doesn't bother me nearly as much as when people use "defiantly" instead. My brain can skip over "definately" as an obvious typo, but "defiantly" really throws me off since it's an actual word that could be grammatically correct (although nonsensical) in many of the sentences where it's misused. Even after I've concluded that it was supposed to be "definitely," my brain still can't help trying to interpret it as written. Same problem with "discrete" for "discreet," "diffuse"/"defuse," etc.

Also, I hate it when people use non-standard forms of emphasis for no good reason. We have plenty of good tools for emphasizing words. On computers, we have italics, boldface, and underlining to emphasize or call attention to text. If only plain text is available, various substitutes have become common, such as bracketing the word in *asterisks*, surrounding it with _underscores_ to evoke underlining, or the (sparing) use of ALL CAPS. So why do people with all of these options available instead choose to emphasize their text with Random Non-Standard Capitalization, replacing spaces with periods between every.word.in.the.emphasized.phrase*, etc.?

*I have no problem with the (sparing) stylistic use of sentence fragments. That. Is. Different. One is taking artistic license with the rules, the other is simply ignoring the rules willy-nilly.

[cwm]

I have to preface this one. I love my friend, I really do. She's got horrible dyslexia, and knows this.

Her dad's been in the hospital, and she's keeping everyone up to date on facebook. Where she posts about his cretin levels. Creatinine doesn't even sound like cretin where we live, two syllables difference. And I did reply to her first post asking what his actual creatinine levels were at, which she answered. She just couldn't get it into her head that his cretin levels were not the right thing to be saying.

Another one I hate: whilst. Yes, it is a valid word. Yes, it does mean the same thing as 'while'. Yes, some people do use it regularly. But to go through and Find/Replace every instance of the word 'while' in something and put in 'whilst' is just so wrong it's not funny.