Your Biggest English Language Gripes

American usage in British ads, e.g. "X just got bigger (etc)" rather than "has just become". At this rate we're in danger of generations growing up without knowing how to use past tenses correctly.

I try not to be prescriptivist about language use, because language evolves, some people have learning disabilities, it doesn't strictly matter how a thing is said as long as the meaning is clear, etc etc etc, but I simply cannot get behind "should of". "Would of". "Could of". It's HAVE. I'll excuse you everything else as long as you make a solid effort to remember to type "have" instead of "of" in these cases.

Not quite under the same category but while we're here, I think it's the absolute height of rudeness to get someone's name wrong. We all make mistakes sometimes, as long as we apologise and learn then it's completely forgivable, but if you're continually misspelling someone's name, especially in a place where all communication is written (like, say, the internet) and you therefore have no reasonable reason to get the spelling wrong (typing Clare when it should be Claire, for instance), then I have to assume you're just an exceptionally rude human being.

Baemax you beat me to it,

Well, the French never care what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly.

tmesis, bugbear twins!

viserys, I'm a language learner and teacher. Foreign speakers of English often speak it more correctly than us

(I realise this thread could turn into a let's try and outdo each other (whom instead of who etc.), but please let's not do that.)

I also hate it when someone abbreviates a name or uses a variant form on the assumption that it's close enough. The name someone gives you is the name they want you to know them by, so don't decide that a different name would be better.

Where I used to work we had someone who went by Dave as a shortened form of his given name, and some slightly officious person decided this was too informal and insisted that the company records had him listed as David. Except that his name was actually Sukhdave. Oops.

And Hebrews learn it backwards which is absolutely frightening.

I know a few people who say "generally" instead of "genuinely" and that gets me. Usually the same people replace "specifically" with "pacifically". Arg.

One phrase I often see on facebook is "Happy belated birthday". Aaaarrrggghhh! It is the greeting which is late not the birthday.

I've gotten really sick of this too.

There is a really bad habit in these parts to pluralise usually brand names but all sorts. Tesco = Tescos, Asda = Asdas, Costa = Costas.

People who say that English is an incredibly difficult language to learn and use the "ough" sequence as an example. If English is so difficult then why do so many people automatically go to the same single feature as their illustration?

English has its irregularities, certainly, but so do other languages. I gather that even Esperanto has had irregularities creep into it.