It bugs me when people say “the thing is is that” (if you listen for it, you’ll start hearing it… or maybe that’s something that people only do in my area.) (“What the thing is is that…” is fine. But “the thing is is that…” bugs me.)
Also, “just because <blank> doesn’t mean <blank>.” That sentence structure invites one to take “just because <blank>” as a noun phrase which my brain really doesn’t want to do. Just doesn’t seem right. But that sentence structure is very common.
And I’m not saying there’s anything objectively wrong with either of these. Language is weird and complex and beautiful. It’s just fascinating that some commonly-used linguistic constructions just hit some people wrong sometimes.
Edit: I thought of another one. “As best as I can.” “The best I can” is fine, “as well as I can” is good, and “as best I can” is even fine. But “as best as” hurts.
I hate that punctuation is “supposed” to go inside quotation marks. If you doing anything more complex than a simple statement of a quote, you run into cases where it doesn’t make sense to me.
Did he say “I had pancakes for supper?”andDid he say “I had pancakes for supper”?mean different things to me.Similarly:
That jerk called me a “tomato!”andThat jerk called me a “tomato”!It feels to me that the first examples add emphasis to the quotes that did not exist when originally spoken, whereas the second examples isolate the quote, which is the whole point of putting it in quotation marks.
Yes! That’s a good one.
Once place I’ve heard this take on punctuation mentioned is in Eric Raymond’s (version of) the Hacker Jargon File.
(I just realized when I included a link in the above sentence, I included the word “in” to make it clear I was not referring to the whole Hacker Jargon File, but rather a specific part in it.)
Completely agree, I put puncutation outside the quotes, screw the rules, being sensical is more important.
I agree with this so much. Your understanding just makes sense to me. And it’s even worse because we don’t do that in German, so I’m used to the sensible way! That just makes it feel extra weird.
Hard agree on this
I go out of my way to rephrase sentences due to this. That jerk called me a “tomato” for some reason!
Yeah but I shouldn’t have to restructure a sentence because some dipshit centuries ago made an objectively stupid grammatical rule that generally increases ambiguity.
Sure, but we don’t control what happened centuries ago.
Yeah but we can react to said change to either entrench or undermine it. I choose the latter.
Oh yeah 100%. This is a grammatical rule that I specifically refuse to follow. Writing it the “correct” way can and does meaningfully obscure the semantics of the quoted utterance in some circumstances.