English usage blog

I don’t know if you will agree with me, but I think it is not O.K. to say “I could care less”, when you mean “I couldn’t care less”.

Apparently Computerworld thinks it is OK to use the incorrect usage, see Google Phone: Why I Could Care Less…For Now.

I thought this was an attempt at a clever headline, offering a play on words of the common phrase “I couldn’t care less”, but having a quick read of the article, it was obvious that this writer just didn’t know the meaning of his own headline.

It was particularly amusing to see that the first comment for the article went as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Hi there,

When someone starts a sentence with “ten times”, for example, “smokers are ten times”, do what do you expect the next word to be?  ”Less” or “More”?  Does one of the examples below sound wrong to you?

“Smokers are four times more likely to be able to kick the habit…” or

“Children are seven times less likey to smoke if they perceive strong parental disapproval…”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi guys,

I have covered a few homophones on this blog.  I thought I would take a look at the word “Homophone”.

The wiktionary entry says:

1. A word which is pronounced the same as another word but differs in spelling or meaning or origin, for example: carat, caret, carrot, and karat.^[1][2] Read the rest of this entry »

Hi guys,

Has anyone noticed this one: people using the word disclaimer, when they mean disclosure!  This is one of those things that I have noticed a few times, mostly when people are posting on a forum or on the comments of a blog.  It’s idiomatic to write a disclaimer and it makes fun of disclaimers on content found on line, and in real life.

From the wiktionary enty on “disclaim”: Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that people who make comments on blogs and other social sites make a few grammar errors.

I wonder if there have been any studies of what fraction of blog comments have grammatical errors.  People making comments don’t want to spend a lot of time proof reading what they have written, especially when many blogs require you to sign up in order to post a comment.

I have seen the following mistake on a few blog comments, but not in a blog post.  People say “your on a roll”, where they mean “you’re on a roll”.  I guess it is an easy enough error to make, when english also contains the phrase, “this is your”, as in “this is your donut”.

“You’re” is meant to be an abbreviation of “you are”, which is distinctive from “your” which means that the person you are talking to has something.

I was geeking it up the other day, reading a blog about mysql, when I noticed this grammatical faux pas, in the first sentence of the post, no less:

All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

Err, look, I was reading a news blog the other day, and this sentence stood out to me like a sore thumb:

A further point of potential conflict is how Bing dolls out the search sweets to publishers.

Now this is on a pretty big website and I expect a certain quality standard for its posts.

What’s wrong with it? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure you have noticed that a lot of blogs are written by people who might know english as a second language.  I think it is great that people all around the world can take part in the internet publishing democracy that is happening right now, but I have noticed some occasional glaring errors in english usage.

I am lucky enough to have a good grounding in the english language, which is the common language of the internet.  As you read this blog, I hope you can pick up some of the points of usage that make the difference between someone with fair english, from someone with a good grasp of english usage.

I hope to inject some quirky humour along the way, to make the journey a little easier.  Enjoy!