My major pet peeve is people who don’t know when to use subject or object pronouns (I/me). I have had colleagues ( when I worked in a school!) tell me “You can always call on S or I for help”, and so many vloggers say things like ‘I just made lunch for my husband and I”. The best/worst ones are horrible language manglings like “it’s my husband and I’s anniversary” which makes me shudder. It isn’t even a hard rule to master, you take out the “X and” bit and see if you would say I or me by itself, no need to understand the grammar behind it, though why that isn’t being taught in schools just beggars belief. It often crops up in scripted TV shows, tomy great chagrin, as this means no-one on the writing/acting team picked up on the mistake at any point, or if they did, they didn’t address it!
Another school colleague used to put the past tense where a past participle should go, so would tell children they should “have went to the toilet before we went to the park”. So many influencers make this mistake, it drives me bonkers to hear “I have ran” and other such delights! Again, it‘s really not that hard to get it right!
Perhaps it’s just because I was made to sit in front of a mirror and say things like “these three things” until I stopped pronouncing my th’s as f’s as a young child, but hearing people say ‘Fanks, I fink it was a fing I fought about free times” just makes my ears bleed! The k sound for words that end in g gets on my nerves too, and don’t get me started on people dropping their h’s and especially their t’s - no Collaeral Beauy is not the name of the film you saw, it’s Collateral Beauty!
I am thrilled to find this thread! My mum did an English Lit degree and has always made sure (my siblings and) I speak properly, correcting our mistakes and explaining the rule(s) until we understood it/them and could spread the word. We weren’t allowed to watch Eastenders as the characters use incorrect language like ain’t, drop their t’s and pronounce th as f quite often!