Day 15 – Three pet peeves

Day 15 – Three pet peeves

Grammar – I grew up at a time when use of proper grammar was equated with being civilized and educated. But these days I continue to be appalled at the way that bad grammar (and spelling) is accepted. The “rules” that I learned are constantly being broken. One that particularly bothers me in the last several years is the verb “graduate”. This verb did not take an object. So, the form that I was taught was “I graduated”. And if you wanted to get more specific, then you could say, “I graduated from college,” again with no object but a prepositional phrase to make it more specific. And although this is still the proper form of that verb in every other English-speaking country, in the US the verb is now allowed to have an object, i.e. “I graduated college.” The Oxford English Dictionary labels this as “US informal,” but as a grammarian, I cringe whenever I hear it. This is but one example of the butchering of the language that peeves me

Distracted drivers – Although I own a phone that supports text messaging, I use it sparingly, and never while driving. But the number of drivers that I see using their phones while driving is upsetting. The percentage of accidents attributable to distracted driving continues to rise, but people continue to do it. And it’s not just texting. I have seen drivers putting on makeup (with the mirror blocking their view of the vehicle in front of them), reading a newspaper or book, painting their toenails(!), etc. Are people’s lives so busy that they need to constantly multitask and put the lives of themselves and others at risk?

Entitlements – I won’t go into a lot of detail here as much is written by others about the sense of entitlement that people have, especially in the US. From unemployment benefits to disability benefits to $15/hour wages – so many people have the expectation that the world owes them all the benefits that the rest of us have to work for. It seems that the major function of the government these days is to take money from anyone who has earned it, extract a fee for administering the program, and then giving these funds to those who haven’t earned it. I could go on and on with examples, but that would not serve any benefit, so I’ll just stop here.