One of my pet hates is the terrible use of English you see and hear these days.

There seem to be many people under the impression that the word “those” does not exist, and that “them” should be used in its place. For example: “them people over there”. That probably annoys my dad even more than it does me.

Commonly confused (and misused) words:

• their, there, they’re
• your, you’re
• now, know, no
• it’s, its
• whose, who’s
• right, write
• then, than
• lose, loose
• accept, except
• affect, effect

Learn the differences between each one… I beg of you.

Another thing that annoys me is apostrophe abuse. This poor little punctuation mark is supposed to denote possessiveness or contractions – NOT PLURALS. The plural of logo is logos not logo’s etc (the plural of lego is lego ). I can understand how some apostrophe use can be confusing, for example “its” is a possessive but you don’t use an apostrophe there, otherwise it becomes a contraction of “it is”.

Also when you contract 2 words you put the apostrophe where letters have been removed, not between the words… a good example of where people go wrong is “is’nt”… it’s supposed to be “isn’t”.

How about the prevalent use of double negatives? “I ain’t seen no one”. Well have you seen anyone or not? I can’t tell if you’re being stupid or actually haven’t seen anyone. Some rap songs these days seem to manage triple negatives! “I ain’t never seen no one”.

Now, before I get any comments about any possible errors I have made in this post (Bonita I’m looking at you ) my use of the English Language isn’t perfect by any means, but the way things are going I seem to be in a minority – I respect the language and try my utmost to write things correctly. It’s just a shame to see some people abusing it so badly, without even realising.

Update: I found on the alphaDictionary website a list of the commonly misspelled and mispronounced words in English. Makes for interesting reading.