Grammar and spellling that make you twitch

[Elfmama]

The misuse of "myself" has become extremely rampant of late. "Myself" is reflexive. Only I can do (anything) to myself. No one else can. So....
Please email Carol or myself if you have any questions. - wrong.
Ugh - I see that in emails almost daily!

I think that one goes back to the I/me question.  Should I write "email Carol or I"?  Or should it be "Carol or me"?  Because neither of them look right now.  I know!  I'll write "Carol or myself" instead of either one. 

[Liliane]

Another one:

Expresso.

Really?

(This reminds me of an amusing anecdote from sixth grade though. My teacher tried to insist that the x in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was, in fact, an s. Even when confronted with proof, she refused to believe it was not an s...)

[Paper Roses]

I was going to ask if we were including pronunciations!  So since you brought it up . . .

"nuke-yoo-lar" . . . no.  You do not sound smarter or more important because you say it that way.  Quite the opposite, actually.

"calvary" when they mean "cavalry."  No, they are not interchangeable. 

"in lieu of" means "instead."  It is not a synonym for "in view of," even though it sounds similar.  You were not unable to get to work in lieu of the snowstorm, but you might have been unable to in view of it.

It is not chi-pol-tay. 

The s at the end of "Illinois" is silent.  And so is the one at the end of "debris." 

[daen]

Regarding the use of myself/yourself/himself...
I was taught a rule of thumb that you may use the *self pronoun if you've used another version of that pronoun in the same sentence. It ends up limiting the use of actions that pronoun has done to pronounself, or uses the self form as an intensifier.
"He did it himself."
"You yourself know that this is true."

The intensifier usually ends up sounding overly formal, like the writer/speaker is trying too hard to sound important.

How about the misuse of quotation marks? It's similar to apostrophe misuse.
I've seen this sign in a thrift store:

"More"
"Fixtures"
in
"The Back."
"Thank You."

I don't know whether or laugh or cry when I see it.

[Paper Roses]

YES!!  Whenever my MIL give anyone a greeting card, she always put on the inside the name of the person it was addressed to, and then the year, both in quotes.  Then she'd sign it putting "Love" and her name in quotes.  So it was like:

"Dave"              "1989"

Happy birthday, blah blah blah, dumb typcal card language, blah.

"Love"

"Ma"

[VorFemme]

I flinch at the one I see here: Diety. No. Deity. From deus.

Diety means 'like a diet' and I vote against it being a real word.

Haha, me too!

"I before E, except after C, and only when the sound is 'ee'." Too many people were not taught the bolded part of that rhyme!

I learned it "..or when sounded as A as in neighbor and weigh".  I think because it rhymed, it was easier to remember.

[VorFemme]

"Conversating" on the corner and "axing" someone a question during it - people, using the wrong word does not make you sound SMARTER and more edumucated (yeah, they used that one, too) because you are using long words on the court show on TV). 

If anything, I was wishing Judge Judy would tell them to spend the money that they got from the "dependent" on grammar lessons from Kelsey Grammer.  Or someone who has a vocabulary larger than a third grader's.  (A TV game show reference got worked in - just for fun.)

[zyrs]

The one thing that sets my teeth on edge seems to be making a comeback.

Casted rather than cast.  I was raised that you cast a play, a fishing line, or a spell.  Recently though I have seen the word casted used in sentences pertaining to doing those things and read articles talking about how casted is becoming popular again.  It still makes me cringe.

[Teenyweeny]

I think that people use "please ask Jane or myself" instead of "please ask Jane or me" because they think that the addition of -self softens the request.

You'll often see the use of the "Jane or myself" phrasing in emails that are unnecessesarily wordy, and I think it's because people fear being perceived as terse, because tone is so easy to misjudge in an email.

[Another Sarah]

Just thought of two more
Unless you are a transformer, it's our car not are car.

and so many people these days are replacing comic (as in funny) with comedic (as in of the nature or pertaining to humour, most commonly used as a theatrical term)
When you see a film, sometimes it may have elements pertaining to comedy, but usually it just has funny bits.

[perpetua]

"Then" instead of "than" - they're completely different words and I really don't understand how people mix them up. As in, "my house is bigger then your house". Then your house what?

[Teenyweeny]

Something that I've seen on Facebook:

Where I grew up, a lot of people pronounce the pronoun 'I', as 'A' (as in apple). Fine, that's an accent thing.

I CANNOT deal with people actually writing it that way! It's not any fewer letters (how could it be?), and it makes you look illiterate!

[crella]

I love this thread! All my 'favorites' are here  'definately', 'wallah', 'per say'.

One I have been seeing a lot of lately is 'bare' instead of 'bear', as in 'bare with me'. No, thank you, I'll pass!

[123sandy]

Let's not forget good old there, their and they're!

I like to watch Judge Judy and so many people mix up borrow and lend I actually began to wonder if I was wrong. (She/he borrowed me $500)

[cabbageweevil]

YES!!  Whenever my MIL give anyone a greeting card, she always put on the inside the name of the person it was addressed to, and then the year, both in quotes.  Then she'd sign it putting "Love" and her name in quotes.  So it was like:

"Dave"              "1989"

Happy birthday, blah blah blah, dumb typcal card language, blah.

"Love"

"Ma"

Quotation-marks-round everything, as here and in daen's example: I seem generally to be getting into a role of defending bad practices -- but I can see where the misusers are coming from, here.  Especially when they're among the less adept of writers of the language.

Lynne Truss in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" (in which she's usually merciless toward any incorrect punctuation) seems to feel the same way, and cuts "quotes-round-everything" folk a little bit of slack, while emphasising that this habit of theirs is incorrect.   She cites the small boy who was taken to task for quotation-marking all his written composition work, regardless of whether it was reporting any speech.  When asked why, the lad rather disarmingly replied: "Because it's all me talking".