r/grammar

I was just talking about the street sweeper and I said “Why are they streeping the sweets?”

I didn’t mean to mix the words up. So weird right? What’s it called.

[USA] I started to notice this phrasing trend in podcasts. Now I’m noticing it in scripted news, it’s intentionally being used. Where does this phrasing style originate from? My guess is that it’s supposed to sound more informal and approachable(?) It sure bugs me as it sounds sloppy and wrong.

Example: “Neil Armstrong, he was an astronaut on the Apollo 11 mission.”

Instead of: “Neil Armstrong was an astronaut on the Apollo 11 mission.”

Example: “The teacher, she walked into the room full of students.”

Instead of: “The teacher walked into the room full of students.”

I’ve also heard it imbedded within a longer communication, not only at the start of a sentence. Anyone else noticing this trend?

The word despite is comfortably within my vernacular as a contemporary student. However, the phrase for all is not. Likewise, I am currently trying to close that gap by learning their usage differences. From my surface-level investigation, it seems that the phrase for all connotes a sarcastic register, whereas despite functions more as a structural pivot. I wanted confirmation that my investigation was correct or incomplete. Any input would be greatly appreciated. (I promise this is not ai generated slop, I am neurodivergent and unfortunately tend to write in this way).

Example:

"Despite his wealth, he was miserable." vs "For all his wealth, he was miserable."

This is by far my most pedantic pet peeve as we seem to have just accepted it in the era where many just go to Starbucks.

That being said, coffee is a liquid, you can't count it. You need a unit of measurement there. You can have a cup of coffee, a medium coffee, a large coffee, 16ozs of coffee etc. But you cannot have one coffee unless you mean the beans in which case for clarity it would probably be best to say one coffee bean. ​

1. Along the road came a strange procession.
2. Along the road a strange procession came.

So I have started to read "Catcher in rye" to expand my vocab and I noticed peculiar sentences, that looks like question, but it's meaning is declarative. For example:

"Boy, could he get on your nerves sometimes." = He is really irksome. Why not just swap could and he?

What are these sentences called?

The internet seems to suggest that it should be 'a dozen eggs' (not 'a dozen of eggs'), but I'm not so sure.

A. 'a dozen of eggs' uses the structure: a/an + singular noun + of + plural verb. You can find examples of this structure in dictionaries:

• https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/dozen (the 3rd example)
• https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/dozen (the 2nd example from the Corpus)

B. We say things like 'a crowd of people', 'a flock of birds', 'a bunch of bananas' etc., which are very similar.

C. It's possible to find real-life examples of the phrase 'a dozen of eggs' itself:

>Take a dozen of eggs, a quart of cream and as much flour as will make it into a thick batter

– The Household Companion: Hundreds of Menus and Remedies

So who is right here?

Hello, everybody. Today, I bring, to you, a query on the subject of capitalization. I’ll present you with an example (keep an eye open for the word “lady”), and then, I’ll ask you the question listed as the title of this post, namely: should I capitalize “lady”?

Example 1: “ … Having a police car accompany an ambulance is a routine proceeding when the nature of an injury is unclear. Please remain at the scene until the dispatched party arrives, and, for God’s sake, lady, keep your dog away from the wounded man.”

Question: Should the “L” in “lady,” when “lady” is being used as it is in the example above, be capitalized?

Attention: You do not need to read the rest of this post in order to interact with it. Every piece of vital information can be found in the text above this paragraph.  

Now, I did, relatively recently, make a post titled “Should I Capitalize Terms of Endearment?” In said post, I made no mention of the word “lady,” partly because I don’t see it as a term of endearment but mostly because I forgot I had used it in a way that might warrant capitalization.

Anyway, it might be worth noting that, after reading the comments underneath the post “Should I Capitalize Terms of Endearment?” I decided against capitalizing all terms of endearment that aren’t used exclusively to refer to a singular character. In accordance with this decision, my gut feeling is that I shouldn't capitalize “lady.” I also feel like capitalizing “lady” would imply that the person being referred to is of royal lineage, which they are not. Although, that could just be because I associate the word “lady” with the phrase “my lady.”
Either way, I wanted a second opinion and thought this query could serve as a nice break from the onslaught of ridiculously lengthy posts I routinely flood this sub with.

As usual, any and all input is greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading, and I look forward to reading your replies!

For instance, if you work at a food kitchen just because people tell you how great you are for it or, make a film about the environment butyoure just doing it for praise and money.

I feel like im missing an obvious one but also im looking for colorfully fun, slang terms.

My grammar book says:

> Adverb particles are often fronted when giving instructions to small children.

> Off we go!

> Down you come!

What if I wanted to express the same meaning but when speaking to other people than small children. Should I just remove fronting? E.g. 'We go off!' or 'You come down!'? Or maybe it would be 'Let's go off!' and 'Come down!'? Also 'go off' in the first example means 'leave a place', right?

Personally, I am not a fan of the em dash. I think it's too powerful a piece of punctuation with its ability (correctly or incorrectly) to successfully function as a comma, semi-colon, colon, parenthesis, ellipses, and / or general container for all manner of sentence fragments. Whenever I've tried writing with an em dash saved to a shortcut or clipboard for easy typing, my writing has ended up sloppy and clunky—there are indeed times and places for the em dash rarely I suppose, but too often its overuse leads to undisciplined and stringy prose!

What are your thoughts, however? Are you more a fan of this piece of punctuation? Does its commonality in AI outputs affect your attitude?

I hear phrasings like "three year ago" and "that cost me seven pound" from British media a lot, particularly from Scotland, but I recently came across a passage from Blood Meridian where they say "two year ago there were a lot of buffalo". Is this a colloquialism or an anachronism? And what is its origin? Does it follow the same rules as measuring statements like "ten-ton brick" or "five-year-old"?

I came across a video that was captioned with "Me dying the shirt my mom just bought purple because clothing brands are allergic to fun colors." Apart from the fact that dyeing is misspelled, is this easy for you to understand without punctuation?

I recently came this spelling for the plural of wildebeest in an oldish (ca. 1965) children's book about animals. Is this archaic or still correct? I can't seem to find much mention of this spelling online...

Would I say the chicken tuna opener?

or the chicken and tuna opener?

The opener can open chicken and also tuna.