English grammar contains many tricky pitfalls. Should we say “the media are” or “the media is?” Is “majority” plural or singular? (The answer is of course: it depends. Media is per definition the plural form of medium, but there are countless examples of ”the media is.” If enough people choose to interpret media as singular, that’s what it’ll be. And majority can be either plural or singular depending on the situation.)

However, some things shouldn’t be hard.

Lately I’ve seen many examples of people writing “alot.” I think this has turned into my new pet peeve.

“This matters alot to me.”

“He did alot of damage.”

“Her rectum has seen alot of penises.”

I won’t give you any links to the offending sites since I don’t want to be an anal bastard. (Yes, I’m terribly proud of this pun, coming right after the last example above. I’m giggling right now, in fact.) But I really don’t see how hard it is to make that non-existing word into two separate – correct – words. And I also don’t see how people reason when they write alot. Are they confusing it with allot? That’s a verb, for Bog’s sake!

Now, there might be some mitigating circumstances. For one thing, as a non-native English speaker I might have missed something; maybe this error comes from how one learns the language as a kid, or maybe it’s caused by schools offering strange grammatical rules to apply in strange places. Since I learned English after my native tongue I might be immune to those particular traps. Who knows! But it still irritates me. As this page notes: “just remind yourself that just as you wouldn’t write ‘alittle’ you shouldn’t write ‘alot.’”

Speaking of that site (Common Errors in English) there are other cool mistakes listed there. “Awe, shucks,” “full of pith and vinegar” and similarly mutilated idiomatic expressions seem to be very common – and I find that quite interesting since I haven’t seen many of these errors. Again, this is probably due to my non-native-ness: I mostly read English literature, watch English shows, read semi-litterate English articles and so on. I’m probably protected from everyday English, in other words. Even if one can complain alot (ah-hah) about the linguistic quality in books, TV, movies or articles, they probably have much better grammatical correctness compared to speaking to Bob the janitor while you’re waiting in line for the bathroom.

To all people who get the urge to enlighten me about how hypocritical I am since I complain about other people’s grammar but make mistakes myself: please send your complaints to shut_the_fuck_up@karjasoft.com

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Linguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.