Indeed, the “its/it’s” confusion gets worse than that. More times than I care to think of, I’ve seen the possessive “its” rendered as “its’”. Yes; with the poor apostrophe hanging useless and forlorn from the word’s caboose.

We could all avoid the “x AM/PM in the morning/evening” tautology if we used the sensible European 24-hour clock. Having learned it perforce when the Army claimed me, I eventually realized its superiority. The aviation community standardized on it long ago; you don’t want any ambiguity when you communicate with Air Traffic Control.

Finally, I recall someone’s report of a luncheon meeting being addressed by VP Dick Cheney, whose wife also attended. He began by saying “Thank you all for your kindness to my wife and me.” Whereupon one woman, at the table of the person reporting this, sneered “That idiot! He doesn’t even know enough to say, “My wife and I.”

Um, I did not realise Glenn would be linking to this and exposing my non-English teacher-ness to the wider world.

Haha!

I am really guilty of saying ‘okay’ way more than necessary, and loads of other language infractions. I actually think it’s a massively irritating character quirk more than trying to be clever… but that only applies to me, of course. Everyone else is just not speaking English correctly. Haha again!

The “ridiculously” is redundant.

Things of every conceivable nature also “impact” them all the time. Which explains why colorectal surgeons hereabouts are so damn happy. All the time.

They commit these egregious and annoying usage errors irregardless of the fact that almost every one of them is someone whom has attended at least some public schools.

Shocking.

Also, how about the oft-asked question, “Where are you at?” What’s with the “at” in this statement? What does it add that, “Where are you?” doesn’t say completely?

And here’s one for us engineers: those dolts in baseball games that describe a pitch’s velocity. It’s “speed,” damn it! Speed is how fast an object moves (a scalar quantity). Velocity describes its speed and its direction (a vector quantity). Who ever heard of a police velocity trap testing drivers’ obeyance to the posted velocity limits? So, when that ninny Joe Morgan says “velocity and placement” it’s even worse, because now he’s being not just ignorant, but redundant. More syllables rarely make you sound more intelligent when a more appropriate word of fewer syllables will do just fine, thank you.