Look at that, a list! Such clickbait. But I’m not sure how much of a list it’ll be: at the moment I can only think of three or four things to put on it, though perhaps I’ll think of more as I write. Because you see, I’m not sure there are so many things that really annoy me about the way native speakers use English. I’ve been thinking about this recently while looking round the internet to see what other people are writing about the English language. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff out there, but I noticed that a lot of people like to write about things that annoy them about the way people use English. Reading what they wrote, I realised that I don’t seem to get so annoyed about things like that. Maybe it’s because I’m a teacher so I’m used to understanding the reason behind a mistake. Maybe I’m just curious about why people say things the way they do.

I understood why these people got annoyed of course, and I know why we naturally don’t like when people say something differently from how we do. So I thought to myself: Are there things that annoy me? Let’s see what I can come up with…

Continue reading →