Three pet peeves to cheer up your Wednesday

"I feel badly." That's shocking! Do you have leprosy? Some kind of neural dysfunction? Linguists, please correct me if I'm wrong, but "I feel badly" is commenting on one's ability to feel, not state of emotion. We don't say I feel sadly or I feel happily. If you want to say how you're feeling, the state of your emotions, an adjective, not adverb, is correct. I heard Donald Trump correct someone on TV the other day with this very phrase. I used to think it was a weird regional phenomenon, but if the Donald has been taken in, it's clearly a widespread plague. And it's got to stop!

Recently we were driving on a highway going 55 MPH. Dean was driving. I look over and see the man racing alongside us, texting as he went. I counted how long he was looking down: 1...2...3...4...5... He looked up to see that yes, he was still more or less in his lane and still going 55, so down he looked again, 1...2...3...4...5... My math isn't great, but I think at that speed we were going 400 ft in 5 seconds. Who in their right mind is comfortable driving 400 ft without looking? I glared at him till he noticed me. I hope he understood: Hey, Jackwad! I've got kids in this car! You are being reckless and stupid and putting my kids' lives at stake! He did look properly chagrined and put down his phone. We caught up with him again a mile or so later. Back at it again. This arrogance gets me riled up. Really? What you're doing is SOOO important you're willing to risk your life and others'? You're probably checking email and reading a news blip about celebrity divorces. Jackwad.

Since H1N1 outbreak, so many public places have installed sanitizer dispensers. This is great! Until I go to use it, discover that the sanitizer is out, so now my hands are not only still dirty, but I've infected them with all the bacteria and viruses left behind by other sanitizer seekers. Ugh.

A little snark, properly directed, can change the world. Snark away, my friends.

Comments

[Enna Isilee]

I agree. I agree. I agree.

I also have a problem when people say "I had those ones." Or "Can I have these ones?" It's just THESE and THOSE. Try it. You really don't need that extra "ones."

I only just found out that saying "you've got" is incorrect. You're just supposed to say "You've a friend in me." But that sounds super-weird when you try and sing it...

[Tracy O'Daniel]

My dad used to harp on us for saying "these ones." I think it is because one can't be plural; singularity is implied. Needless to say, because of that and many other things, grammatical errors in speaking and writing drive me up a wall.

[melissa @ 1lbr]

I'm bothered by the "this is her" response when you call and ask for someone on the phone. "This is she" is correct. (But, hey, I'm quite sure I've said "I feel badly" before, so I'm not doing any finger pointing.)

[wendy toliver]

Good ones, Shannon! My biggest pet peeve today is littering. Interesting fact: when I worked at Disney, I learned that there's a trash can placed about every ten feet because that's how far a person will usually walk before tossing garbage on the ground.

[Annie]

Today's pet peeve: How is it that my email address and signature can say "Anne" and certain coworkers continually write "Dear Ann?" Anne of Green Gables and I are furious.

[Jaclyn Weist]

I have a few here and there - slow drivers and slow walkers are on the top of the list. But my biggest pet is and always will be the fact that just because my name is Jaclyn, people think its ok to call me Jackie. No offense to those that use the name Jackie. I don't. They don't ask me what I prefer. When they do ask and I tell them Jaclyn, half the time it STILL ends up Jackie. WHY!?!

[Shannon Morris]

Oh, don't even get me started!!!!

[Q]

When there are grammatical errors on signs in public places, my heart dies a little. It's unprofessional.

[Frogster]

I'm with Q. Our local Wal Mart had "stationery" spelled wrong....in the SCHOOL SUPPLIES section! Needless to say, I marched over there with a pen and changed it.

Our local paper also has spelling and/or grammatical errors located within almost every day. This is one reason my dad calls it "The Daily Disappointment." I was co-editor of my high school newspaper and our paper looked much better than our local one!

Just call me the Typo Nazi, but my mother is the same way.

[Sandy Shin]

Texting, or even talking on the phone for an extended period of time, while driving drives me up the wall, as well. It's just needlessly dangerous.

[Ellar]

Texting while driving is now illegal in North Carolina; I don't know why any state wouldn't have banned it yet. It has to be one of *the* stupidest things you can do while driving. And completely unnecessary.

Biggest *spoken* grammatical pet peeve, though, is letting "at" just dangle there at the end of a sentence. "Where are you at?" is like nails down a chalkboard...

[Karla]

My biggest pet peeve: seeing kids unbuckled in a moving vehicle. Come one parents! I know they don't always like it, but buckle them up already! I hate reading about a child fatality (or adult for that matter) that says, "The victim was not wearing a seat belt."

[Princess Loucida]

@Jacklyn Weist

People shorten my name all the time. Really Tessa is not that much harder to say than Tess!

[Katie Willden]

A couple weeks ago I drove past an unbelievably slow car on the freeway and when I looked over at the driver I saw that she was CURLING HER EYELASHES! With an honest-to-goodness eyelash curling gizmo. While driving on the freeway. I drove along shouting, Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!"

[Ruby Diamond]

I was in the passenger seat and my driver (an acquaintance a few years my junior) started texting.
"Don't text while driving."
"Sorry," he puts it away.
Minutes later it comes out again.
"Seriously. Give me that thing. What do you want me to type?"
Gah! I would much rather type your texts for you than DIE at 65 mph.

[Kylie]

I hate it when I find errors in books. And people who feel like they constantly have to correct my last name and tell me I'm saying it wrong. Yes, substitute teacher, I am well aware that my last name has two gs in it. It is not pronounced that way. Get over it.

[Uly]

"Linguists, please correct me if I'm wrong, but "I feel badly" is commenting on one's ability to feel, not state of emotion."

For this you want a grammarian, not a linguist. Linguists typically limit themselves to *describing* language, not *correcting* it. You can ask a linguist why people say "badly" instead of "bad" in that sentence, and you can ask a linguist when people started saying "badly" instead of "bad", and you can ask a linguist which groups of people are more likely to say "badly" than "bad", but asking which is correct is like asking if shorts and t-shirts are more or less correct than suits and ties. The answer is: It depends!

Linguists are therefore useless if you want to have quick yes/no questions to thorny issues of prestigious grammar.

As far as hand sanitizer goes, apparently it does nothing to curb respiratory illnesses at all, though it does have some affect on the spread of gastrointestinal disease.

[Jen]

In the vein of grammar peevishness: I wish people would always use "than" properly. I see so many thens that are actually supposed to be thans.

I also think many people use "different than" when it should be "different from." "Different from" just feels more correct to me.

[Uly]

In my own brand of peevishness, I wish people would distinguish between SPELLING and GRAMMAR.

When you speak aloud, you do not typically make a distinction between than and then - you know which one you mean from context. Spelling one wrong (or confusing their and there, or to, too, and two) isn't a grammatical error, it's just spelling. English orthography is a mess.

[Calliope1of9]

I hate it when people talk with a mouth full of food. Drives me nuts. Oh and homophobic slurs. People who leave their doors and windows open when they have their air conditioning on. Loud gum chewing. People who get really snobbish about art or music. That's all folks.

[Chalinor]

all those with name problems, please I get called all sorts of names like Chandelier or Shasta, or even Shamu. Where on earth do people get Shamu from Chalinor pronounced (sha-li-nor)??? why not call me Chali like I tell everyone to? Just one of those things to add to the list. :)

[A.P.]

i don't mean to laugh at your pet peeves, really i don't. but i remember reading your tweet about the texting man and the tweet after specifying you weren't driving while counting how long the man wasn't looking at the road. it made me laugh.
also i love the anti-bacterial note. it is soooo true!

[Hannah]

One of my word-related pet peeves is the overuse of the word "methodology," nearly always in places where the speaker/writer actually means "method," but wants to appear more erudite. Isn't "methodology" the STUDY of methods, NOT a method itself?

[Carmen]

I had a class recently (in college, in an auditorium) and someone a few rows in front of me played games on his laptop for the whole hour. Not only is that really rude (whether the teacher notices or not) but I found it pretty distracting.
In the same class (on a different day, though), I spent a class period sitting a few seats away from a boy and girl who spent the whole time talking to each other. I could barely hear the teacher - why do they bother coming to class?!?

Another pet peeve: lots of people mistakenly use "I" instead of "me."

"My friends and I went to the mall, but my brother drove my friends and me home."

If you'd say "me" without the other people in the sentence, say it with them too. You wouldn't say, "my brother drove my friends and I home" because he wouldn't drive "I" home!

[Paige]

When someone uses the phrase 'I could care less' instead of saying what they mean, which is 'I couldn't care less', I cringe.

Unfortunately I think I am fighting a lost cause here. I constantly hear 'I could care less' being used in not only everyday speech, but also in movies, TV shows, and professional work places.

P.S. Do any of you other self-proclaimed "Grammar Nerds" feel that the ability to really appreciate grammar is both a blessing and a curse? I hate having to hold my tongue each time a friend makes a less-than-obvious mistake, for fear that I may sound like a brat.

[Lalani]

I do believe the speedy checkout lanes at stores should be labeled '10 items or fewer' instead of '10 items or less'.

[Kelsey]

I was so confused with 'I could care less'. The sad thing is, I'm not sure I've ever heard it the right way.
Their/they're, your/you're, its/it's, whose/who's, etc. Mom drilled those into my head and now it makes me shudder to see them spelled incorrectly. I get exposed to so much horrible grammar and spelling on the internet, you'd think I'd have exhausted that part of my brain which is constantly double-checking, but it's still going strong.

[Lia]

Feel bad/badly, wow! I just wrote a blog post on this issue 3 weeks ago. I think the Donald Trump thing has recently stirred up the issue again. I studied linguistics in school, but I'm an editor by profession.

Donald Trump was out of line -- not because he was incorrect, but because it's never a good idea to correct someone on an issue where half the grammar commentators are of one opinion, and half are of the other. Feel bad/badly is truly an undecided issue.

English speakers have been using the phrase "I feel badly" for a long time, with nothing to indicate that it was incorrect in any way -- until the snooty grammarians of the early 1900s arbitrarily decided it wasn't. Before that time, you could examine the usage and simply conclude that "badly" is in some cases an adjective, as many dictionaries have done. Personally, I don't think much of those grammarians with their invented "rules," but they still get respect in some circles -- among 8th grade English teachers, for example.

The following two paragraphs are the final words of the very long entry for feel bad/badly in Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, a standard usage dictionary used by many editors in the U.S.

"The attitudes of the usage books to feel badly is interesting. Almost all of the school handbooks, from grade-school to college level, prescribe feel bad; it is clearly the pedagogical standard. But Copperud 1980 sums up his survey of dictionaries and the more general usage books with this observation: 'The consensus is that feel bad and feel badly are standard and interchangeable with respect to both emotional state and physical condition.'

"Conclusion: the controversy over feel bad and feel badly has been going on for more than a century, and since its beginnings lie in two opposing prescriptive standards — that of the 1869 handbook prescribing feel badly and that of the 20th-century schoolbooks prescribing feel bad — it is unlikely to die out very soon. People will go on about as they do now — some differentiating bad and badly, some not, some avoiding badly, some not. You can see that the question is not as simply as it is often claimed to be, and, with those considerations in mind, make your own choice. Whatever it is, you will have some worthy comrades and some worthy opponents."

[Paminas_bard]

You travel the length of a football field in 5-6 seconds when traveling at 55 MPH. That's about how long it takes to check a text message.

[Je Reve]

Once my local paper had the headline after some flooding of, "Dead Fish Found Dead". A pug was marked in a classified add as having a "microship" (microchip). And yet, the institution of media is still popular...

[Rachelle]

I agree with the texting peeve but am not too perturbed by the others.

As for the hand sanitizer, I listened to a discussion (on NPR) where two scientists discovered that hand sanitizers do little more than smear around the germs (and encourage antibacterial-resistant strains of germs to thrive). Hm. Washing with water is still the best for me.

And the grammar? I've always treated the "feel bad" vs. "feel badly" in the same way that I treat "feel good" (cheerful state of mind) vs. "feel well" (healthy state of body). Some grammarians agree with this; others take the adverb vs. adjective tack (which would make "feel well" incorrect if we applied the rules uniformly).

As a teacher, I'm often in the position of deciding that a student needs to work more on expressing a good idea well rather than taking the time to word-smith a bad idea. I'm always happy to find a paper in which all I need to correct are grammar and spelling errors or overuse of the increasingly popular comma.

[Burning]

I hate it when you think a pair of underwear is nice and soft and made for winners, and then it gives you terrible wedgies all day long.

[Sandstorm]

I've found that people are using the word "myself" in all types of horrible ways, such as "Leave your forms with Mr. Smith or myself." If in doubt, use the word "me". Two-year olds use the word correctly when they say "I can do it myself!"

Also, in church settings the word "thy" (meaning "your") gets used in all the wrong places. No, I'm not Jesus' mother.

I think people should be required to take a physics class before getting a driver's lisence. People tailgaiting me at 70 miles an hour when I have four kids in the car makes me really mad.

[Christen]

Annie, I know what you mean! My name is spelled kind of unusually, but it's obvious when you look at it how you're supposed to pronounce it AND spell it. Geezie louisie! :)

[Lainey]

Oe of the few blogs I can read.... Haha, jackwad...... Curse those cellphones

Oh and, snark on

[Rosie Brinsek]

I can't believe nobody mentioned apostrophe abuse! It's everywhere! Also no one seems to know how to spell "definitely" anymore-I see an A added to it. People, the root word is "define," so spell it d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y!

[Chalinor]

well, I hate to say it, but some of that stuff like "I could care less" is quite fun to say! just like when people say "how are you," and your response is, "I'm doing well." of course your doing well, but it just rings badly in the ears. down here in Texas, the thing to say is, "I'm doing purty good." I'm just giving everybody a hard time ;). it's fun to do every once in a while!

[Jenny]

It's kinda pitiful though-- I was homeschooled for a little over then two years, and went to public school this past semester. I was disapionted to find that not only was I the smartest kid in the class because I LIKE diagraming sentances, but I also found that they do not teach grammar at all anymore. I could major in teach my youngers at the moment--!! This world is PATHETIC. Grammar is one of the greatest things in life-- and this is how is goes out? Poorly???
(I'm only in seventh grade, too!)

[Mimi]

I know! I love Grammar, and in my class we had maybe twelve or thirteen classes teaching it! How do they expect us to write correctly if we weren't taught how?

[Carmen]

I'm in college, and I've never learned how to diagram sentences.

I never knew much beyond distinguishing nouns, verbs, and adjectives (and sometimes even those would give me trouble!) until my ninth grade English teacher spent a week on each part of speech. It helped, but I think English basics should be taught in elementary school, when kids are still learning the language, rather than high school, when they're supposed to be mastering it!
Anyone wonder why students so often have poor grammar?

Another pet peeve is the increasingly popular use of "so." Whenever I hear "I'm so happy," or "I'm so sad," I can't help wondering: how happy / sad are you?

[Liss]

when i see signs that are spelled wrong or grammatically incorrect, i just think, "you paid for that??!?!?" and "is there NO proofreader at a sign company?" (let alone just using a spell check of some sort?)
as for the antibacterial stuff, most of the ones i've seen you don't have to touch anything, they are motion activated. maybe everyone just needs to move to those kind :)

[aax]

Some books have wrong grammar. I wonder if the author did it on purpose or by accident.