I haven’t heard it, but there’s a Black Eyed Peas song called “I Gotta Feeling”. When I initially read a status update about it on Facebook, I thought “oh, I think they were supposed to type ‘I Got a Feeling’”, but no! My research tells me that the song title is indeed “I Gotta Feeling”. Let’s take a minute to dissect this title, shall we?
To me, “gotta” means “got to”, which means “have to” or “have got to”1. For example, “I(‘ve) gotta go” means “I have to go”. Essentially, the title of the Black Eyed Peas song means “I have to feeling”, rather than “I have a feeling”.
I have no idea whether this was intentional or not, but it got me thinking about grammar pet peeves. Apart from your/you’re, which is too obvious to mention (even though I just did), here are some of my pet peeves relating to grammar/spelling/usage:
- Have got, such as in “I’ve got something for you”. Perhaps this is the succinct writing fan inside me, but the “got” seems completely redundant. “I have something for you”, to me, is so much better. That said, I’m certain I sometimes use “have got” in speech, though it wouldn’t grace my writing.
- “Try and” doesn’t even make sense. How can you try, and do something? I prefer “try to”. This appears to be an error that is “wrong”, but “acceptable”.
- Incorrect use of affect/effect.
- Incorrect use of its/it’s.
- Incorrect use of lose/loose.
I like to think my grammar and spelling are above average. However, I’m positive I make errors on a frequent basis. The above list are things that annoy me, but I sometimes wonder whether I make errors that annoy other people. If so, I’d love to hear about it.
Apart from the obvious — like the you’re/your — I find that when people use compliment when they mean complement, or conductive when they mean conducive, these are probably the most annoying grammar/spelling pet peeves for me. What’s worse is that most people *don’t* know that the latter word exists, and act self righteous about them either nor existing or meaning the same thing.
Wow, I hadn’t noticed the error in the title until now! The song itself is good to dance to, but extremely annoying to listen to (and there are many dance songs I love to listen to, so basically I dislike the song). You should still give it a listen, though.
I think lately my grammar-nazi tendencies are starting to slide — that paragraph above bothers me because there are so many hanging “to”s, but I can’t be bothered to rewrite it. The only error in your list that I really can’t stand is loose/lose.
@Meg: Coincidentally*, I heard the song about three times the night I wrote about never having heard it. I also have it stuck in my head as I type this.
* Considering the context/people involved, it might not be such a coincidence after all. It was at a party, and two of my friends like that song a bit too much.