Common Errors in English Usage | Hacker News Reader

Common Errors in English Usage

wsu.edu

86 pointsgeorgecmu49 comments

I thought this looked familiar. Then I realized it's because I've submitted it before ;-)

Original link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502209

Quite illustrative that links do indeed tend to fall off the newest page too soon. When posted 83 days ago, it got 1 upvote.

For a much better look at English grammar, check out Grammar Girl: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/

Her blog covers English usage and grammar issues in simple, "quick and dirty" tips. So you'll usually get a quick explanation of why something works the way it does, and then get a quick tip explaining how to remember it.

I also bought her book (which is just collected posts from the blog.)

Just checked her site and it's really good. Thanks for the tip.

I have found one interesting tip regarding braces, brackets and parantheses. While I use all three of them all the time, she says that brackets and braces are seldom used. Moreover, she asserts that most probably many of readers have never used braces. And she is right. Just shows how different the world seems to her compared to what it seems to me.

Maybe a list of common errors in English usage would be more useful if it were a manageable list. How about the 20 most common errors in usage. I'd bet (but surely there are some studies on this) that the following would appear near or close to the top of the list:

it's for its; there for their; alright for all right; 'the reason is because', for 'the reason is that'; dangling modifiers; missing or unclear pronominal antecedents; and subject/verb agreement.

Loose vs. lose comes up far too often here.

Also: http://www.uta.edu/owl/top20.htm

I also notice a lot of "eke vs. eek" here. Turns out there's this property called onomatopoeia that escapes many people.

In fairness, "eke" is a rarely used word. No such excuses for they're/there/their though.

Whether it's used rarely or frequently, it's still incorrect and I see it all over the place, which was my point...

This one too is common:

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/couple.html

From the outside it seems to be a US, West coast affection.

Yeah, that's more "slang dialect" than "error".

Also, did you mean "affectation"?

Mixing up "less" and "fewer" is quite common here as well.

also then for than

Umm.. What about then/than? That seems to be the most common mistake.

I believe this has already been posted to HN several times. It also appears some of the word links are broken. ie oeuvre

Does this happen to anyone? Sometimes, I don't make an error - I didn't know it was an error that existed or that was commen - but upon reading about it, I start making the error.

This is similar to when I read about psychological disorders and the like - it seems like I learn about something and start acting it out in some weird way.

Long story short, sometimes I'd rather not read these lists of common errors.

Your comment made me wonder if commen is a common misspelling of common. It appears that's all you.

I bought the first edition of Bugs In Writing (http://www.amazon.com/BUGS-Writing-Revised-Guide-Debugging/d...) years ago, and have found it an excellent reference.

It's aimed at technical writers and is a beautifully written book. Highly reccomended.

[Edit: I've just been reading the reviews on Amazon, and it seems a few people are put off by the 'cuteness' of the book, feeling it's not professional. The book has a strong personality (if a book can have such a thing) and lots of cat references/pics, so if you're likely to find that annoying it's not the book for you. Myself, I liked it]

When in doubt, you can also use my little webapp: http://phras.in

It also works if you type something like this: http://phras.in/realize/realise

/shameless plug

"Although digital clocks routinely label noon “12:00 PM” you should avoid this expression not only because it is incorrect, but because many people will imagine you are talking about midnight instead. "

Uh?

I highly suspect this is outdated advice. Technically there was some ambiguity about whether 12pm/am would denote midnight or noon, since am/pm are relative to noon. However, the computer age has utterly removed that ambiguity. 12pm is noon, 12am is midnight. Digital clocks have spread familiarity with that convention widely throughout the developed and developing world. I doubt there is any serious confusion any longer.

I suspect that this is a piece of advice (avoiding the use of "12pm") which particular crufty old newspaper editors hold onto dearly even though it has passed out of utility.

I regularly see people getting 12am and 12pm mixed up -- using midnight and noon definitely reduces confusion.

You'll still confuse people (generally outside Anglo-American culture) who are used to 24-hour digital clocks.

If they've not familiar with pm timing, they'll be confused for the entire afternoon, not just noon.

They'll almost certainly have encountered am/pm times before, but nobody teaches you the 12pm = noon convention.

Yes, I distinctly remember learning as a child in the 1980s that 12pm was noon and 12am was midnight. I also remember being confused because I thought it should be the other way around at the time.

I just started a github repo to port these to a machine readable format

http://github.com/maxogden/common-english-errors

Is it just me, or does the phrase, "Common Errors in English Usage" sound wrong? Shouldn't it be, "Common Errors in the Use of English"? So I checked on their own site: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/usage.html. I guess I'm right. :)

How does it imply that you're right? "Common Errors in English Use" sounds much worse to me.

It says that, as a general rule, you should use 'use' instead of 'usage'. So I reconstructed the sentence to make it use 'use'.

Also, the :) was intended to make it a bit of a joke.

> It says that, as a general rule, you should use 'use' instead of 'usage'.

Nowhere does it say that. It says that only if both seem appropriate (obviously disallowing modifying the rest of the sentence -- that is clear from the context and the example). In this case, "use" doesn't seem appropriate at all.

Ok, you win. Although again I would like to point you to the initial smily, ":)", meaning, "joke".

> Unlike asbestos removal, “as best as” removal is easy, and you don’t have to wear a hazmat suit.

What a fantastic resource, and what a waste that it's in dead paper form (or even web page form).

An automatic style checker would be far more useful, and I bet with some machine learning you could crank out useful but conservative warnings for every one of these entries.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/their.html This one.

For the love of all that is holy, if you have to read just one then read that one.

Effect / affect is a bugbear of mine, it pops up every now and again in bug descriptions and so on i.e. "this bug has effected a number of users".

Great reference site, thanks.

"Fill this form OUT? You don't fill a form OUT, you fill it IN! Have we all suddenly turned American?!?"

If only Hugh Laurie had any idea then about his role as Greg House.

It's great, but try reading the one on apostrophe's and see if you can still get it right every single time. We need some sort of academy anglaise to make decisions on the language and exorcise the apostrophe once and for all. Cursed thing it is.

I'm pretty sure you made an apostrophe mistake in "apostrohpe's" - the "s" is making "apostrophe" plural.

That was a stab at irony, which apparently flew over the heads of most readers.

I do not understand where the confusion lies. In the vast majority of cases its use is simple.

As I am always forced bring up in English grammar threads, without a formal (decidable) grammar or an agreed-upon body of work to signify "common usage," there is no formal way to decide whether any statement is grammatical English.

English isn't a formal language so it doesn't matter if there's no formal way of deciding grammaticality.

Usage is mostly about imprecise, changing social conventions. That doesn't imply that it's useless to talk about it. We can talk about language usage more or less in the same way we talk about what to wear on such and such occasion.

That's not how I think about things. If you claim that a certain statement is "incorrect" English, to me that means you must have a decision procedure in mind. Sure, most of the time it's "common sense" whether something is grammatical: "The sky is blue" is fine and "They sky are blue" is wrong. However, the same applies to deciding whether programs halt or not. Most programs either halt quickly or are obviously infinite loops, yet we know a decision procedure that works on arbitrary programs is impossible.

I'm not suggesting that talking about grammar is impossible or pointless. I'm saying that for the discussion to make sense, there needs to be some formal way to settle whether something is grammatical or not. You could try to make a formal grammar for English, but that's probably futile. A better approach would be to choose a list of written works as the English "canon" and judge usage (hopefully as objectively as you can) against that body of work.

You could say the same of pretty much everything. Just because something isn't perfect or provable doesn't mean it can't be useful. Just look at this as a guide to English grammar at the date it was written.

Actually, lots of things are formal. Statements in mathematics, assuming all parties agree on notation and convention, is formal. It's quite easy to decide if, for example, a statement in first-order logic is well-formed (correctness is another issue altogether, and as we know no formal axiomatic system can be consistent and complete).

To me, it's a contradiction to say "x isn't a formal language with a decision procedure for well-formedness" and "A is/isn't a well-formed statement in x."

I often intentionally use these on people as sort of a test.

Do you make a lot of friends that way?

Gentlemen, start registering your quirky domain names!

The point of English is that when they become common enough they become correct.

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