It didn’t take long for the internet’s keyboard commandos to become peeved with the way current (as this is being written) Jeopardy! phenom Matt Amodio responds to some of the clues used in the challenging game show. While his answers are usually correct, he always begins his questions with “what is . . .” even when the correct response is the name of a person.

But the “what vs. who” controversy is just the tip of a very large iceberg of peeves that people harbor about the English language. I’ll dispense with the everyday peeves about the distinctions among “there, their, they’re;” “to, two, too;” and “your, you’re, yore,” since those are already over discussed — as well as being things we all should have mastered by the sixth grade.

I want to tackle the tough peeves. Like: Is it “fewer” or “less” items at the supermarket? Most picky people contend that instead of reading “14 items or less,” the sign at the checkout should say “14 items or fewer.” I say “Fewer what?” I think, that in order to be correct, the sign should actually say “14 or fewer items.”

And then there are those hypercorrect people who use “I” when “me” is called for. If you’d never say “Greetings from I,” then why on earth would you say something like “Greetings from John and I”?

Even worse than the hypercorrect are their sanctimonious correctors. Why, one guy online even wrote: “When my neighbor says, ‘my husband’s and I’s,’ I want to hit her in the mouth.” Easy now, they’re just words.

And if pet peeves about words aren’t enough, there are also a lot of peeves against people who have no compunction about using incorrect punctuation — or even too many spaces!

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For example, I was surprised to find out how many people felt as strongly as I do about the incorrect use of the little apostrophe (thank you for that). One thing that people found particularly offensive was the little mark’s use (or non-use) in “its” (the possessive) and “it’s” (the contraction of “it is”).

Apostrophe advocate John Richards cautioned that it can be used for contractions and possessives, but not for plurals of nouns, abbreviations, or dates made of numbers. But by late 2019, things in the apostrophe world had gotten so bad that the 96-year-old Richards pulled the plug on his 19-year-old Apostrophe Protection Society, lamenting, “The ignorance and laziness present in modern time have won.”

And some people even get all in a tizzy about space. Yup, empty space. As in how many do you put after a sentence-ending period? If you learned to type on a typewriter, which has a monospaced font (each letter takes up the same amount of space), you used two spaces at the end of a sentence so people were sure that it was over.

People who started typing in this millennium probably learned on a word processor, which makes fonts proportional, meaning that those folks would need to use just one space after the final period, which has now become the norm. Or, to quote Jennifer Gonzalez of cultofpedagogy.com, “Nothing says over 40 like two spaces after a period.”

No neighbors were injured in the writing of this column.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”


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