User:ImprovedWikiImprovment/Common Colloquial Bad English

This essay isn't about Wikipedia specifically but rather about our great English speaking friends' inability to speak English properly, although there are some that apply to Wikipedia edits. Although it's not surprising that this is the case; English is one of the hardest languages in the world for many reasons. For instance the adjective describing something relating to the Sun is "solar" which has no relation to the word "sun". In Spanish, the word for the Sun is "sol" and the respective adjective is "solar", clearly a derivative of the original word sol. There are hundreds of examples of this such as "Moon" and "lunar"; and "cow" and "bovine". These are called collateral adjectives and result from English's high amount of influence from different sources. I could go on about homophones, or the difference between words for some animals and their meats but the point is that English is hard. So hard that speakers make mistakes they probably don't know are mistakes. So here are common mistakes that annoy me. Grab some popcorn and enjoy...

Writing

The mistakes listed here describe mistakes most common in writing, including here on Wikipedia.

Who and Whom

Surprisingly, people here on Wikipedia are pretty good at this one. Using the "random page" function, it took me hours to find a page that misused the word "who" where "whom" should have been used. It also doesn't annoy me that much mostly because I am guilty of making the mistake myself. In case you're wondering: in complicated terms, who is for the subject of a sentence whereas whom is for the object of a verb or preposition. Of course, most of us have no idea what that means so in more basic terms, who refers to he, she or they but whom refers to him, her or them. You can remember it because him and them ends in an "m" and so does whom. For example:

With whom did you go?  I went with him.

Or...

Who hit whom?   He hit him.

Or...

There are ten people here, of whom six(of them)  are stakeholders in our company.

Which and That

Some authors are even guilty of this one including Stephen King who admitted he had made this mistake in one of his books as described his non-fiction book "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft". This mistake is easy to make because it is subtle but it's there; these words are never interchangeable. Again, in complicated terms, where which or that would commonly be used, "that" is used when the sentence needs the clause that the word "that" is connecting. If it doesn't then the word "which" should be used. Not complicated at all, right? So, in basic terms, "that" suggests there is more than one of what you're talking about but "which" suggests there is only one. For example:

The shop, which has two floors is in Birmingham.

The shop that has two floors is in Birmingham.

In the first, it is simply stating that the shop has two floors and is located in Birmingham but the latter says the same thing but suggests that there are multiple shops in question, almost as if the next part will be something like "and the shop that has one floor is in Nottingham".

They're, Their and There

The fact that grown adults (although there is no age limit on Wikipedia) struggle to use these three words correctly is truly shocking; they should have learned this when they were eight.

They're - Short for they are - "They're good people."
Their - Possession - "Their cars are very slow."
There - Location - "It is over there."

It's and its

I am not going to write a sentence - it's just stupid.

It's - Short for "it is" or sometimes "it has" (informal) - "It's very good"; "It's been great"
Its - Something belongs to a thing - "The dog picked up its ball."

Semicolon (;)

A lot of people simply do not know what a semicolon is or how to use it. Many times I have seen a comma used when a semicolon should be there. It annoys me since I learned how to use one in primary school and yet the majority of grown adults, especially here on Wikipedia, don't have a clue how to use them. It is simple; firstly, a semicolon is used to connect two or more ideas within independent clauses. For example:

Some like vegetables; others like sweets.

In these examples, using a comma would be completely incorrect and some people here on Wikipedia would instead have a comma here. This isn't the only way a semicolon can be used; it can also be used if they aren't independent clauses but several clauses that are independent from the rest of the clauses in that sentence. For example:

Some like vegetables, which are very good for them; others like sweets, which taste very good.

It can also be used for extended lists i.e. lists with items of two or more clauses. For example:

The town has a museum, which contains some of the oldest paintings in the province; a shopping centre, which has seventeen shops and three restaurants; and a train station, which is the busiest outside the country's capital.

Now hopefully you can write like an adult!

Capital letters and full stops (.)

Yes, there are people who actually don't know how to capitalise and basically punctuate in English. Well I learned this when I was five but here are some of the rules for capitalisation:

1.You capitalise a word if it is at the start of a sentence, not a clause, a sentence.

Today, you went shopping.

2. You capitalise if the word is a proper noun. This includes places, people, organisations, days of the week and months of the year.

There is a bridge in Sydney called the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

3. Directions are only capitalised if they refer to a specific region.

Travel north on the M6 for 300 miles from here to reach Northern England.

4. "Large" words should be capitalised in titles but not "small" words unless they are the first word.

An American Werewolf in London

5. Words that derive from proper nouns are capitalised; the word "English" derives from "England", a proper noun.

I like science but by far English is my favourite subject.

6. The word “I” is always capitalised with no exceptions.

Last week, I decided to go to Spain because I think that it is very nice there.

7. The first letter within speech marks is capitalised.

Then, suddenly he said "Please stop what you're doing, speak better!"

In relation to full stops, they go at the end of a sentence, at the end of something within speech marks (on the outside if the wider sentence ends there or the inside if the wider sentence continues) and only at the end of brackets (within) if they are at the end of a sentence.

All he wanted was for everyone to speak properly.
And then he said "No, go this way because it's faster." and his reply was "Okay, whatever you say".
It was all over (or so he thought.)
It was all over (or so he thought) for him.

Everyday Speech

These don't relate to Wikipedia at all but are just some mistakes of people's conversations with each other.

Can I get...

This mistake annoys me a lot, probably too much. When people go to a counter in somewhere like McDonald's and say "Can I get a BigMac...", if I worked there I would say "Yeah, come with me you can get it yourself if you want. I was going to give it to you but...". Now do you understand why this is just wrong. The correct terminology is "Can I have..". If you don't say this one give yourself a gold star.

Could of, Should of, Would of

Just makes zero sense. The only word that can really go before "of" is a noun. Obviously, the reason people say and write this is because it sounds like the "'ve" prefix. The correct words or phrases are either "could have", "should have", and "would have" or "could've", "should've", and "would've.