Given all of the fuss over “alright”, it is probably foolish to say anything about grammar, but some things do get under my skin. When you are talking about awards, it is either “the Hugo Awards” or “the Hugos”. It is not “the Hugo’s”. Possibly people think that they are indicating a contraction, but it always comes over as looking like they think apostrophes indicate plurals. The next time I see someone do it I shall set Deb Geisler on them.
OK, throw things at me.
I will not throw things at you because I feel the same way. I am SO tempted to buy many copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves and give them to people whose punctuation annoys me.
I need to find a comparable book for people who use the incorrect word of a pair/pare, lose/loose, affect/effect, whose/who’s, than/then, here/hear, there/they’re/their… I’m sure you’ve got the idea by now.
See my comment re hunting idiots at conventions at Whatever.
I recently discovered the existence of a personal liability policy that would have provided insurance cover for me, had I decided to throttle people (or done other bodily harm to them) at certain points in my past. It is a very, very good thing that I did not know about this policy several years ago.
But I do not bring my bow to conventions. It is not, shall we say, subtle in all of its royal-blueness and amazing gearwork. My *sword*, on the other hand, did attend one Worldcon…but it was carefully ensconced in a display case.
Kerry @1: http://xkcd.com/326/ — for when you get bored of just correcting basic mistakes.
It is not “the Hugo’sâ€.
Unless of course Gernsback’s ghost took to referring to himself as “the Hugo” and then became possessive about the award.
Tero @4: Yes, I am aware of the very few cases where effect may be used correctly as a verb. Also, I love xkcd.