Your Biggest English Language Gripes

Starting every sentence with "So...."
Where has that come from ?

I wasn't going to join this thread but I have to commend d'James and hulmeman for raising the incorrect use of "myself", "yourself", "ourselves" etc. But it is not overuse, it is just plain wrong, and the sad thing is that the people wrongly using these pronouns should really know better. I get the impression that people now think that using "me" or "us" sounds impolite and that it is more courteous to use "myself" and "ourselves", which it is not.

Thank yourself! ;-)

That sounds a hell of a lot ruder than it was meant to. I was just trying to illustrate the misuse of -self.

I'm actually shocked that you have a real name. Doesn't everyone just call you Burly?

I also wince at "didn't used to" - no, it's either "used not to" or "didn't use to" - and I've seen this in respectable broadsheets, so what hope is there?

When leaving Leafy Surrey to further my interest in the business we aficionados call show, at the end of my train journey I am forced to listen to this recorded gem:

'You are now approaching your final destination, London Waterloo, where this train terminates.'

A journey can terminate, a train cannot (well not in the sense they mean.)

I hate it when people insist on applying non-rules of English: you mustn't end a sentence with a preposition, you mustn't split an infinitive, you can't use they as a singular pronoun. Language Log calls it "prescriptivist poppycock".

Exactly- there's little excuse for getting names wrong (aside from inital mispronunciation). 

But I'm curious at those here with a long list of complaints, do you actually correct people when they speak to you?

I've said before in similar discussions I find the whole nitpicking for superiority points largely distasteful- as Burly says few people are doing it intentionally. This level of critique also doesn't leave room for regional dialects etc as well- where do we draw the line? We have a long of 'Wenglish' ways of saying things here, especially for billingual people and word order/phrasing is often not 'proper' due to a combination of regional dialect and billinguallism- that isn't 'wrong' in my book and written English (or Welsh) would still be 'correct'. I'm all for teaching people correctly but just like my accent might drop the occasional 'H' or similar I don't see the harm in a bit of informal phrasing in spoken English either. 

The one that comes to mind is the increasing use of "gotten" in British English. I dislike reading it even in American English but accept it is a valid word for Americans; however it should not be making so many appearances in British English. I agree with the previous comments on the use of "of" when it should be "have". In spoken English my biggest bugbear is the ridiculous overuse of "like", which we have already had a conversation about on here fairly recently.

Apropos the discussion on proper names, I have been asking my family to call me by my full name rather than a short version for the last 22 years but most of them still use the short version, to my annoyance.

I feel I should report myself for a violation of acceptable English. Unless stopped, I will insert the word "just" about 5 times into every sentence. The word has long since lost its actual meaning which means it can be placed absolutely anywhere and still make sense, so I end up writing things like "I just went to the shop on Tuesday to just see if they had any bread, but I just couldn't find any so I thought I'll just ask the man behind the counter. I just went up to him and he just put down his newspaper and said 'we're just out!' I just couldn't believe it."

Also I sometimes begin a sentence with a connective which I know is totally unacceptable. "I like Wicked, it's a great show. But if asked I'd say the casts haven't been as good lately." (I had to edit out three "just"s in that sentence before pressing send).