You 'ens, That Ain't Proper Grammar

In my last post I mentioned people butchering the English language. I'm probably not one to talk a lot about that. I come from a small town in Northeast Oklahoma and at times my English isn't great. I certainly have been known to drop the occasional "ain't" into a sentence or find some other way to create a drawl effect on a word that didn't need it.

I do have a couple of pet-peeves when it comes to phrases I hear people use incorrectly. Here are a few examples (and please bear in mind I'm not an English scholar, so I can't use the correct terms to explain why these things are wrong, but can tell you that they are):

- "Senior year" - Immediate question when someone says that is "whose"? My problem with people dropping those two words in a sentence is that it assumes that their senior year is the only one that ever existed. While I'm pretty sure it's grammatically incorrect, it mostly bugs me because it comes across as being fairly self-absorbed. Just to be ornery I have considered interrupting people when they do it by simply asking, "Whose?" just to throw them off.

- "Say sorry" - This is what a parent might say to their child when trying to get them to apologize to someone. The problem here is that it doesn't designate for the child who is sorry. Correctly stated it would be, "Say you're sorry" or "Tell them that you are sorry". That word doesn't really mean much unless you can manage to actually take some ownership of the sorriness, otherwise it comes off as about as heartfelt as it sounds when an angry teen says it and you know he or she doesn't mean it at all.

- "Tell them a Merry Christmas" - Again, parents trying to get their child to do something good, but treating the words Merry Christmas as though they need no verb to make sense. You've got to say "Tell them to have a Merry Christmas".

- "and etc." - This one can happen verbally and in print. If you're running through a list of items and decide to drop the "etc." you don't need the "and". The use of the etc. kind of assumes that there's at least one more in the list. So if you're writing it, you just hit the comma after the last named item in the list and then go straight to "etc." and leave it at that. If you're speaking, just don't say "and" ahead of etc. (which I can't spell and Blogger doesn't recognize)

I'll quit - both because I can't think of any other good examples right now and because this post really isn't going anywhere.