Word Gripes

Today I'm taking care of the little girls all day. Erin and Mike are driving to Dover, Ohio ~ about five and a half hours away ~ to (hopefully) get Mike a new car. There are plenty of car dealers in our area but they wanted a specific model with specific features and this one came up as just about perfect! So they left at 6am and now the girls are eating breakfast bars and watching Finding Nemo because I can't figure out the right remote control to use to dial in The Disney Channel. Duh.

We are going to the Lilac Festival with our friend Bridget when the time becomes a little more human for everyone. It should be fun and it's a springtime ritual here in the Rochester, NY area. Great sniffing, thousands of lilacs, yummy snacks and kettle corn! Yeay! What's not to like?

Anyway... that's not why I called.

I was thinking about word that drive me crazy, especially when they are perpetuated on television and in print. Words that are grammatically incorrect or just bug me. Words such as

irregardless - this work is grammatically incorrect and it's a double negative to boot. The prefix ir- means NOT. The word regardless means without regard. So irregardless means without without regard. Or WITH regard. See? It sounds right but it's wrong.

woken - While the online dictionary says that woken is the past participle of wake, I think it's incorrect or at the very least, it's bad grammar. I wake, you woke, we woke, I was awakened, not I was woken. Makes me hear nails scratching on a chalk boar despite what the online dictionary says.

got - I use this one too but it does bother me. When I was little, my parents (both of whom loved words and language so I credit them with my vocabularly and spelling skills) had a "got pot" for a while. If any of us used the word got, we had to put a nickel in the got pot. It's especially irritating when used as in "I don't got ...." already bad grammar.

gave/given
have gone / went

These are all in a class by themselves - past tense words not being used correctly. There's a country song by Craig Morgan right now, God must really love me and two of the lines read:

After all the trouble I've been in
I'da gave up on me

That last line -- I would have gave up on me. Argh. No wonder people think country artists are intellectually challenged.

It's fairly easy I guess to get gone and went messed up as in "I have went to the store" or "I gone to the store" but it still doesn't sit well with me. This crops up in country lyrics sometimes too and doesn't help the cause at all.

Snuck - as in "He snuck past the open door." This one was John's mother's pet peeve and he has adopted it completely. It is not grammatically incorrect but I still change it in any writing I'm editing if it appears and avoid it in any writing I do. Sneaked works just fine, "He sneaked past the open door." See?

So .... I got to go, irregardless of the early hour and ... oh heck, I just can't do it. Have a great day!