My Biggest Pet Peeve: Grammatical Errors

The other day I was listening to the radio, when Miley Cyrus' new song, "We Can't Stop," happened to come on. And me being, well... me, I listened to the lyrics intently... and had to refrain from throwing the radio out the window in frustration. I mean, come on, every now and again a singer happens to make a grammatical error in their song because it happens to rhyme better, or fits the rhythm, but since when is, "We run things, things don't run we," even REMOTELY acceptable? I mean yes, Miley, "it's your mouth; you can say what you want" but could you at least TRY to come up with another line which DOESN'T make me lose all faith in humanity?

So, yes, my inner Grammar Nazi had been activated. A quick look on Google showed that at least thirty percent of graduating students forced to take a simple English language exam failed, and were unable to be accepted into college. You don't believe me? Search "grammatical errors" on Google Images. There are literally THOUSANDS of examples of street signs, memes, and even newspaper articles abusing even the simplest of grammatical rules. And that's only the internet. Imagine the amount of errors in school essays, e-mails, job applications... People literally don't know the difference between "your" and "you're". I mean, come on, I know that my grammar is hardly at thesis level (how many times in my blogs or reviews have I started a sentence with "and" or "so" or "but"?) but honestly, if you are above the age of twelve, you should really know the difference between a possessive pronoun and an apostrophe of omission.

But seeing as people refuse to listen to the Grammar Nazis on Twitter, Facebook and the many other forms of social media which somehow ALLOW people without a simple understanding of their home language to post comments on the internet for everyone to see, I have decided to take my chances and attempt to educate at least some people in third grade English.

1. The difference between "your" and "you're"

No, sweetie pie. YOU'RE stupid to have tattooed that on YOUR hands. YOUR mother is turning in her grave right now because YOU'RE embarrassing YOURself.

You're = you are (there is an apostrophe of omission... i.e. letters have been omitted to form "you're")
Your = a possessive pronoun (i.e. to show that something belongs to you)

2. They're, their and there

*THEY'RE made from something deep inside THEIR souls because something in THERE makes them special.

They're = they are (once again, there's an apostrophe of omission... a dead giveaway that there's a verb hiding in the word somewhere)
Their = a possessive pronoun (showing that something belongs to them)
There = either an adverb (THERE is a grammatical error in your tattoo) or a pronoun (hey, THERE's that guy whose tattoo has a grammatical error in it)

3. Apostrophes DO NOT show plural forms of words

She FLIES with her own WINGS. The FLY'S WINGS were making a buzzing noise in her ear. The left WING'S engine failed.

An apostrophe can either show possession (the boy's book) or omission (we're = we are). They do NOT make it acceptable for you to just fling around your "s" and create plurals whenever you feel like it.

Usually, when a word ends in "y," the plural form ends in "ies" (e.g. fairy -> fairies).


These are by far NOT all of the grammatical errors made on the internet, but by far some of the most common ones. And unfortunately, these poor people in the images above have them permanently written on their skin... umm ouch?

Hopefully now I have prevented you from making some of these errors! Please comment below, and tell me some of YOUR pet peeves, or if you thought this blog was useful in any way.

"We Can't Stop" has literally just started playing on the radio again... I'm not even joking... Oh the delicious irony...

Please excuse me while I go send hate mail to Miley Cyrus and her songwriter…


UPDATE: I've now uploaded a Part Two due to popular demand. There is hope for the world...