Dear Mr. T:
You wrote:
>Congratulations on a great listing. Perhaps you might consider adding the following which I see regularly: “Your” for “you’re”, “stationary” for “stationery”, “off of” for “off”, “the reason being is” for “the reason being”, “loose” for “lose” and finally for this message the use of an apostrophe “s” to indicate plurals of shrtened words or acronyms “PC’s” for “PCs” although this last item is perhaps debatable.
>Unfortunately I think that this is a losing battle. One clearly unwinnable one is the use of “like” in today’s idiomatic speech – it makes me shudder to hear the ways in which it is used and without it many would not be able to converse! I get like, angry, when I like, hear it!
Thank you for your note.
We do include “off of” on our page titled “Using Of.” The others we have considered spelling problems and do include them in our Grammar Slammer Deluxe software which has a spelling component, but we are not putting those online.
We have seen the apostrophe plus “s” used more and more with abbreviations. Part of the problem is that we use more acronyms and abbreviations than ever before.
When most grammar practices were standardized about two hundred years ago, this was simply not an issue. As a result, people can argue for the use of the apostrophe “s” the same way it is used for italicized words or letters. We tell people who ask us that not using the apostrophe is more traditional but some authorities recognize the apostrophe for that use. People have to recognize that some readers might be confused by the apostrophe and think the word is meant to be possessive.
The bigger problem nowadays is that many people put apostrophe “s” for all kinds of plurals. That can be really confusing.
The use of “like” is, for the most part, a speech problem. People say “like” when they can’t think of what to say, the way others say “uh.” I work with teenagers, so I hear it all the time. I tell them, “don’t write that way.” They don’t.