No doubt I'm a rare breed. I love grammar, and it really bothers me to hear and read grammatical mistakes. There was a time when newspapers and magazines had staff to check for mistakes and correct them. There was a time when people couldn't get jobs in the media, or teaching, without excellent grammar. Now not even teachers speak or write correctly, so how can they teach the next generation?
I'm not talking about the most complicated word usage or sentence structure. This time I'll start with something so basic and so easy to teach it's totally incomprehensible to me why the misusage has become some common, even acceptable.
Let's start with the proper usage of the words "more" and "most" and suffixes "-er" and "-est."
Just a few years ago, when I was an EFL- English as a Foreign Language English teacher, I found a very easy way to teach my students the difference between "more" vs "most" and "-er" vs "-est." I'd give them a very easy way to remember.
-er is two letters, so using it or the word more compare two things:
Joe is taller than Sam. Joe is the taller one. But Sam has more toys than Joe.
-est is three letters, so using it or most compares three or more things:
Kate is ten, but Jane is seven and Sue is nine years old. Kate is the oldest, and Jane is the youngest. Sue has eleven dolls, but Kate and Jane have only six each. Sue has the most dolls.
Too many times I hear or read incorrect usage. Many times I've heard the British Prince George referred to as Prince William's oldest son. He's not the oldest son. He's the older son, since there are only two sons. He's the oldest child of the three children.
I guess I shouldn't ignore the related error concerning usage of more/most vs -er/-est. An adjective of one syllable or two if the second is a "y" gets the suffix, while words of two syllables or more are preceded by more/most.
Sally is the most beautiful of the ten girls in her class. She's even prettier than Ann.
Do these grammatical mistakes bother you? Which common mistakes do you find most annoying?
