Pet Peeve of the Day

[mamajoan]

Today's Pet Peeve: people who say or write "mainly" when they mean "namely." Or vice versa, I guess, although that doesn't seem common.

I mean, dude, those two words don't even mean remotely the same thing. Yeesh.

Comments

[tiggrrl.livejournal.com]

You know, I am not that much of an anal grammer-girl (especially in electronic formats) but every once in a while someone at the office gives me something to read over because they know I'm good at checking that sort of thing, and that's when I realize that my standard level of writing is pretty far above most people's. It's kind of scary, when you think about it, because I tend to think that most people write like me, until I read someone else's work and see all the little errors that I would never have made (word choice, sentence structure, etc.). Most people really don't know the English language very well. My favorite language peeve (although I am guilty of it at times myself) is using "was" in a conditional clause, rather than "were."