Pedants' Corner

[Nick Salmon]

Agreed, Robert. The lack of the second 's' means that I tend to read it as a Liverpudlian term of affection... 'Foc Youse'...the 'd' being silent in those parts ;-)

[Graham Barker]

A big gripe for me is the use of the present tense in documentaries of historical events. It appears to be an American attempt to make an event sound more dramatic, but is creeping into British documentaries too.
An example is "When Anthony comes to the palace, Cleopatra kneels at his feet ". As it is a past event, I believe it should be "When Anthony CAME to the palace, Cleopatra KNELT at his feet. "
Are there any other pedants similarly aggrieved by this trend? Or perhaps there is a pedant who could point out why I should not be aggrieved by this trend.
Graham.

[Tony Griffiths]

What about the missing word 'an', simply replaced with 'a'? Even Mr Grimmond wrote .... a NYCC, whereas I would always say 'an NYCC'. For example 'are you a NYCC ratepayer?" And for those who don't know, NYCC is North Yorkshire County Council. A council that will not exist in two years time.
I also saw a mention of a Austin seven.

Also when did a number of items become an amount of items?

'Number' and 'amount' are regularly mixed up by TV presenters, especially by regional ones on the BBC. As for 'fewer' and 'less" the less said the better (in fewer sentences).

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Another thing that annoys me as a pedant is the frequent use of the recently invented word 'focused'. When I was a lad the past tense of focus was focussed, with double 's'. The pronounciation of the word is changed by the single 's'.

By way of contrast, in the UK skill drops an 'l' to become skilfully - but not in the USA. Why did that happen?

[Mick Hobday]

Does anyone have a plan, a policy, or a strategy? These perfectly good words seem to have been entirely replaced by "roadmaps"!
Note also that the one-word form "roadmap" has recently crept in and replaced the correct OED two-word form of "road map".

[Reckless Rat]

This is for Robert. I also did Latin but badly. Howver as a true pedantic I do remember useless information, such as:

A, absque, coram, de
Palam, clam, cum, ex and e
Sine, tenus, pro and prae
Govern the ablativ-e

?

[Nick Lettington]

Don't start on the inappropriate apostrophe. 

Every time I read about a multitude of Ruby's, I roll my eyes... oh, and now we're on the subject, our cars date from the '20s and '30s...

[Bob Olive]

Did you know that if you got everyone that worked for the Gas Board and laid them all end to end, they still wouldn't reach to our house.


(I hope someone else didn't start a thread like this over a year ago and it died...)

Nothing to do with pedantry really, but your quote about the Gas Board reminds me of one the Dorothy Parker classics " If aal the girls at Vassall were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised." 

I quite like the sound of Pedant's Corner - room for all kinds of rants... and help save threads staying on track?

[Tony Griffiths]

Does anyone have a plan, a policy, or a strategy?  These perfectly good words seem to have been entirely replaced by "roadmaps"! 
Note also that the one-word form "roadmap" has recently crept in and replaced the correct OED two-word form of "road map".

I read that many now-combined words first migrated to having a hyphen before finally becoming one. Even ski-ing was in use at one time, now of course it's just skiing. There's a hypen thief at large - and it can be horribly confusing: https://blog.oup.com/2007/09/hyphens/

[Duncan Grimmond]

The present participle seems to have vanished. "I was stood while he was sat" instead of "I was standing whilst he was sitting" and don't get me started on "Her and me went to the shops". I used to try to correct my son's written work when he was at Secondary school in the 1990's and he insisted that his teachers were not concerned with such trivia, the sense of the piece was more important than the GrammAARRGGHH!

[Tony Press]

Going forward I am not sure I am in agreeance with all the above pedantry.

Raising your voice in a questioning way at the end of each sentence is my bête noire