Unnecessary quotation marks. Someone's taken it upon themselves to blog this, and it's wonderful- I don't get when people got the idea that adding quotes to words just tosses on plain old emphasis. If I find the person that started this trend, I'm going to shank 'em.
A question is not a question without a question mark. "Could you do this for me" is not asking me anything. There has never EVER been any ambiguity about this. This isn't a hanging preposition or a rule that changes when you cross the Atlantic. A question mark is the most clear-cut piece of punctuation in the world, and there's no excuse for not using one. Jesus Christ, how much effort does it taken to push one extra key on the keyboard? You are neither that busy nor that important.
In other news, it's been something like twenty-one years since my birth. My present to myself was finishing my Japanese term paper and ordering some new shoes (I'll party this weekend), but my host family got me a really nice business card case:
Now I just need a business to go with it.
I haven't seen the quotation mark thing in the U.S. Are you talking about a japanese trend, or do is SF just impervious to bad grammar?
Posted by: mia | July 02, 2009 at 12:52 AM
the latter
Posted by: David | July 02, 2009 at 01:08 AM
Mine is needless use of apostrophes. For example, I saw a sign at a small local airport that read "Plane Ride's." Really? Plane ride's what? Who is plane ride?
Posted by: Garth Webb | July 02, 2009 at 01:17 PM
Sometimes grammar issues happen like that. Usually I tend to underline or bold, capitalize, depending if something is typed or handwritten the word that needs to be emphasized. I really like your business card case.
Posted by: Kelvin | July 02, 2009 at 06:23 PM
Over-capitalization is occasionally a faux pas, but there are plenty
of cases where it adds emphasis just fine. Bold and underlines work
almost anywhere (except plain text email, where I usually use an
asterisk on either side of the word).
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:23 AM, TypePad
Posted by: David | July 02, 2009 at 11:46 PM
Apostrophes get brutalized pretty often, too, especially in "It's" and
"its." I might be wrong here, but I think the only time you use it to
pluralize is in referring to a word as a word, ie "My report card was
all A's this semester."
Posted by: David | July 02, 2009 at 11:52 PM
The good thing about your information is that it is explicit enough for students to grasp. Thanks for your efforts in spreading academic knowledge.
Posted by: term paper writing | August 05, 2009 at 12:24 AM
Colloquial English is in a sad state today- it's up to us to do something.
Posted by: David | August 05, 2009 at 07:25 AM