A lot, to be honest. Spend enough time around non-native English speakers and you realise how little sense English makes. Their 'mistakes' have their own internal consistency and in a lot of cases make more sense than English does.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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There are so many examples for this. Some that come to mind:
- "He has 30 years” instead of “He is 30 years old" (Spanish “Tiene 30 años”)
- “How do you call this?” instead of “What do you call this?” (e.g., French: Comment ça s'appelle? I think German too)
- “I’m going in the bus” instead of “I’m going on the bus”
- “She is more nice” instead of “She is nicer”
Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
Or plural (or do I capitalize that here? 🤔) inconsistencies: one “mouse,” two “mice”; but one “house,” two “houses.” To be fair, other languages do that stuff too.
In German that question is: Wie nennt man das?
Or literally: How does one call that?
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What incorrect grammar are you completely in defence of?
Ending a sentence on a preposition :3c
informal contractions are simply informal just because. there’s no real reason to consider them informal or not standard other than arbitrary rules.
“You shouldn’t’ve done that.” “It couldn’t’ve been him!” “I might’ve done that if you asked.”
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abbreviations. it doesn't save any meaningful time. it only prompts questions for clarification because people don't define the abbreviation prior to using it throughout their post. plus since everything is being abbreviated out of laziness, the same abbreviations get used for multiple things which just adds additional confusions.
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I do not like the way that unspaced em dashes look. More generally I don't think that having distinct em and en dashes is actually useful anyway, you can absolutely just use an en dash in either case with absolutely no loss of clarity or readability, but I do need to use em dashes for some work writing so I have a key on my keyboard for it and use it semi-regularly. Whenever I use an em dash outside of a professional context I space it. So, "he's coming next Monday — the 6th, that is — some time in the morning," as opposed to the more broadly-recommended, "he's coming next Monday—the 6th, that is—some time in the morning."
I have absolutely no reason for this other than subjective aesthetic preferences, but it has coincidentally become somewhat useful recently. LLMs notoriously use em dashes far more than humans but consistently use them unspaced, so it's a sort of mild defence against anything I write looking LLM-generated
Em dashes are supposed to be padded with something like a half-space on either side. Some computer systems do proper kerning and will space them out automatically if you don't manually add spaces, but most don't do it. Like you, I would just add full spaces because em dashes practically touching the words is bullshit.
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In German there's the saying "macht Sinn", which is wrong since it's just a direct translation of "makes sense". Correct would be "ergibt Sinn", in English "results in sense", but I don't care, "macht Sinn" rolls off the tongue easier.
Macht sinn to me.
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I dont care about capitalizations, apostrophes, or if you shorthand words like tho as long as i can understand what youre saying from the context
Being excessively prescriptive or nitpicky about the prohibition on ending sentences on a preposition is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.
'irregardless' and improper 'begs the question' are both fine.
Irregardless means what? It's a double negative, so it's "regardful"?
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