What is this 'out stationery' they speak of? An understandable little slip, I suppose. Leave off the first 'out' and the wholly inessential 'to reorder them' and the thing works a lot better. Tomorrow, put a marker pen to it! I hear ya. That is just vile. I was at my dad's the other day and he did that very thing (while speaking on the phone to his car insurance folk), and I've never felt so genetically tainted. I guess the things that most annoy me are the slips that I'm inclined to make...so, when typing quickly and not thinking...there when it should be they're and your when you're is required.
That one made me feel confused recently. I always thought that it was Should have and then I even read Should of, (I think it was on this site too ) And i was like does that have some other meaning that i don't know? I wasn't sure which one of these I actually hear when people speak, confuuuusing. nice to hear that it's an error
Sorry, the marker pen box in the stationary cupboard is empty. I didn't report it for reordering because I wasn't taking anything out. I wasn't taking anything out because the box was empty. Now, about this hole in my bucket...
Haha oh God, what did I start here. It doesn't even really make sense, as not all stuff is in boxes. I think the admin was having a vent that day, because I noticed she looked pissed off when she put up all those notices, one on every cupboard door! Anyway, I'd have worded it differently.
you might be interested in this article on the BBC; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14201796 It gives a list of americanisms that annoy the Brits (I could care less is last in the list). Some I don't understand at all - train station? It's a station for trains surely? The main thing that comes across though is that there's a high correlation between grammar nits and the need for anger management courses...
Paul Simon got it right: "I'm sitting at a railway station...". After all, a train station could be for a road train, couldn't it?
By the way, I was amused by how many of those were actually British English anyway. There does seem to be a correlation between getting worked up about grammar and not actually knowing what you are talking about.
Hmm I call it train station & I think many Brits do. But then my English is a bit of a mixed bag. That's what you get for spending your childhood between a.o. England, Canada & New Zealand, I guess... different languages. What's wrong with 'my bad'? I kinda like that and use it a fair bit.
The correct term would be "my mistake," although I really couldn't care less (Notice "could not") about something like that. My mistake is the intended message for both, "bad" just replacing "mistake." It makes the term broader, but at the same time making the phrase grammatically incorrect. "Bad" is an adjective, not a noun.
Except that "bad" is a noun, with just the required meaning, and has been since at least the time of Chaucer.
"The bad walked down the road." "The bad killed a puppy." "The bad ran off with its carcass." It's not a noun. "The bad man walked down the road." "The bad man killed a puppy." "The bad man ran off with its carcass." In all 3 cases, bad is an adjective, describing "man." He was bad, she was bad, it was bad. All adjectives.
Depends on your view of things... I always found descriptive grammar far superior to, and more interesting than prescriptive grammar.
The Complete Oxford English Dictionary begs to differ. "Bad [...] B. n. That which is bad (in various senses); bad condition, quality, etc. Freq. with the." Interestingly, the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English says that "bad" remains an adjective in all of those cases, but also says that an adjective can serve as the head of a noun phrase, so all of those cases (along with "my bad") are still grammatically unexceptional. The disagreement between the COED and the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English is presumably because in that construction the word in question has properties of both adjectives (eg, it can be gradeable) and nouns (eg, it can take an article) so it's a sort of word-class limbo.
The adjectival use is more common, but the fact that "bad" is a noun as well as an adjective does mean that "my bad" isn't a grammatical error.
That's a circular argument. The dictionary reports common usage, whether or not it is grammatically correct. By your argument, that legitimizes the common poor usage that the dictionary reports. Eventually, some such misuses do become pervasive enough that they become a part of the language. Perhaps some uses of bad as a noun are legitimate - the phrase "the big bad" has been around long enough as a noun phrase to be legitimate. I woiuld grant that more legitimacy than the horrid use of "leverage" as a verb. But i does not mean that every usage of bad as a noun, reported by dictionaries, is accepted. The use of the pronoun "me" in a subject context, and "I" in an object context is widespread and incorrect ("Jack and me met at the arcade." and "The storm caught Julie and I by complete surprise"), but simply reporting such usage does not endorse it.
Common usage by some of the best writers of the language over the last 500 years. Did you see who I was quoting? You use the term "grammatically correct"; what do you consider makes something "grammatically correct"?
Don't you think it's interesting, the way English doesn't have an official academy to regulate how it works? And yet it's more widespread than French or German or a whole load of other languages. English is sort of democratic with its rules.
