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.
