Grammar

When I was in school the "rule of thumb" was "if you take out the other name, does it sound really stupid?"
"Myself" seems to give people the most problem for some reason.
"You can get the information from myself."
"You will be getting a call from myself."
"You can call myself."

"I" is another one...
"She bought tickets for I."
When you're finished with the project bring it to I."

Hmmmmm....

***elijahblue...thanks for restoring my faith! :)

Yes, it bothers me. My pet language peeve is when people use words that are similar as if they were identical. It lessens the nuances of meaning. English has a rich lexicon; let's keep it.

I work with some people who sound illiterate & one of them says "Ast" for ask & K-Mark for K-Mart & prostrate for prostate gland, but the two that really annoy me are "He don't..." & "I seen..." I am only slightly annoyed by "I'm done" instead of "I'm finished." Then the local newspaper writes "it's" for the possessive of "it." I really try not to let these little things bother me, but sometimes you just want to take people by the throat & shake something into them. But then, I live in Texas & their way of talking is usually very colorful & part of their charm is the way they talk.

"yes" and "no" are ambiguous here - "yey" you are crotchety or "yes" I get bothered by the misuse of words? anyway, I agree totally. I correct the business wankers that say "irregardless". I visibly wince when people expand the last work of an acronym (atm machine, nic card, etc.). yes, it matters; there is a world of difference, also, between dialect or stylistic speech and just plain communication. i'm not endorsing dryness!

That's only one example, but a very common one. Another phrase that annoys me is "where is it at?" when the correct phrase is simply "where is it?" A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with. (from fractured rules of grammar).

It really annoys me when someone says:" Can I lend your car?" or " Please borrow me some eggs." Eeeeeeeeeeek!!

You are crotchety old person. Actually some poor grammar does bother me. Just not this example. I particularly take an exception to people who use the word an in place of a in the wrong places (example: an hotel). For some reason it always happens with words that begin with H. Newspapers, magazines, and books do this all the time. Thanks to Mimi's mentioning of mispronounced words I will also comment that I never want to be "axed" a question again.

It bugs me when people confuse "I" and "me", or "bring" and "take" or "lay" and "lie". perhaps I'm getting crotchety too.

It doesn't really bother me, but I do find myself correcting it in my head ... and occassionally out loud.

yes, you're getting crotchety
(YAY survey 1000!)

Yes it does bother me, but that doesn't mean you're not getting crotchety.

I'm getting tired of "orientated" and "irregardless"

"10 items or less" signs in the supermarket drive me batty.

...ain't. And i don't CARE if it is in the dictionary. It isn't a word!

yes and no, depends on how it is misused.

yes, to a degree. if I know what a word means and someone uses it with the wrong meaning, it bugs me. I usually don't correct grammar. I wouldn't necessarily know if I (or someone else) were using incorrect grammar.
*jzp: YES! I usually mock the person by saying "I've never seen one of them, a machine that dispenses ATMs, what an amazing world." at which point they ask me what I mean.. and I'll go off about PIN numbers and such..

Yes, but I don't know all of the rules myself. It bugs me when people are horribly incorrect, but I'm sure it bugs others when I slip.

A subconscious filter in my brain converts language that I consume into some internal representation that I have no trouble understanding. I generally don't notice bad grammar unless the meaning is unclear.
On the other hand, it can be a struggle for me to keep my grammatical output (spoken or written) at a respectable level sometimes, it prefers to decay in quality.
* Gilly, what's wrong with "10 items or less"? (Here I foolishly open myself up for public humiliation and beheading by all of you who wield the English language like a sword...)

Bill - "fewer" is the correct word to use for countable items; "less" is meant to be used for non-countable quantities. For example, I may have *fewer* items in my cart, but there is *less* milk in my glass (than yours). I, too, hate when "I" is used where "me" belongs. :)

You're just getting crotchety.

Yes, but not such a mild misuse as that. And one doesn't have to look far, even in published material, to find more egregious examples. I find myself much more forgiving in a spoken context than in a written one. I remember a self-advertising poster on public transit: "The Ride get's [sic] you there for less." Aaargh!

It bothers me when I know what should be used. But some stuff even I get confused about (that vs. which, me/I/myself, etc). Typos make me insane because I can't NOT see them!
*eris - I used to exercise at a health club and the sign in the locker room said (and I quote) "For your own safty please lock up your valualbes". The sign was up for the year or so I belonged!

..."gave it to him and I." or some other, similar misuse of the subjective pronoun as the object of a preposition just because it's part of a conjoined phrase. And grammar still matters, damn it!

***And in response to Resy, there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition, if the formation is otherwise correct. ("Where is it at?" is not wrong because you've ended the sentence with a preposition; it's wrong because it's wrong. "At where is it?" is no better.) And Sir Winston's famous dictum on this subject was, in fact, a pretty poor English sentence, clever though it may have been. This silly rule was created for the same reason as the equally silly "Don't split your infinitives" rule, the idea being that you can't do it in Latin, and since Latin is (in this odd little worldview) the sine qua non of civilized and rational discourse, then of course, if you can't do it in Latin, it can't be correct in English either. Which completely ignores the fact that they are different languages, with different strategies for distinguishing who's doing what to whom.

Or maybe I'm just a little crotchety today.

Yes is my answer, however it depends on ones knowledge of grammar. I truly do not see where the grammatical error is in your example . Please reply to my e-mail address and explain the error. I love to learn. miykal@hotmail.com
The error that gets to me most because I make it myself when I talk fast is, "This is me (whatever noun)".
Please visit my web page at http://users.bigpond.com/miykal.htm
While my grammar is not so good, my spelling is very poor due to the bad logic of Inglish (English)

Oh yeah. Surely this comes as no surprise to anyone who reads my comments...
Today's story -- Someone was introduced to me today as a "former graduate of Harvard." I cocked my head and said "Is he no longer a graduate of Harvard?"... I later felt sorta bad about it, though.

The misuse of possessives drives me crazy. I'm an English teacher, so I have to care about these things. I mourn the loss of "an" before words like hospital. Oh well.

What I think is really funny: when people fall all over themselves to make sure they use "whom" instead of "who" -- and don't even realize when "who" is correct. :) ("To whom am I speaking?" is correct; "Whom called me?" is not) Juliet: "an hospital"? grotesque!!

bill, mark - and shouldn't it really be "10 or fewer items" rather than "10 items or fewer" ? i know i wouldn't say "10 items or 11"

I get annoyed when people use word position rather than sentence structure to decide which pronoun to use. But I honestly thought 'myself' was correct in that sentence.