Has anyone addressed this before? The past participle of "swim" is "swum." "Swam" is the simple past. You can say, "I swam three times last week" or "I have swum in that pool many times," but you can never say "I have swam ..." It's simply not correct English.
Sorry to be persnickety, but as a former book editor, it drives me crazy every time I see it, and I see it increasingly more often now that I spend so much time here.:nono:
Should of, could of, would of. That right there is my pet peeve. Should have, could have, would have.
i could of swimmed real goodly on saturday if i would of sleeped gooder.
I thought this came from Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront "I coulda been a contenda - I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum."
Former Member
Should of, could of, would of. That right there is my pet peeve. Should have, could have, would have.
i could of swimmed real goodly on saturday if i would of sleeped gooder.
Former Member
i could of swimmed real goodly on saturday if i would of sleeped gooder.
:)
I have actually had people try to correct me when I've used "have swum.". Go figure. I taught 6th & 7th grade English for 9 years, so I've seen more than my fair share of poor grammar, but it's always a shock to me at the number of adults who speak/write poorly. My pet peeves include to/too/two and "have went."
I have actually had people try to correct me when I've used "have swum.". Go figure. I taught 6th & 7th grade English for 9 years, so I've seen more than my fair share of poor grammar, but it's always a shock to me at the number of adults who speak/write poorly. My pet peeves include to/too/two and "have went."
And your/you're, and there/their/they're.
One of my pet peeves is apostrophe abuse--people who put random apostrophes whenever they see the letter 's.' An English instructor I once knew referred to this as "the decorative apostrophe."
I work in academia, and it's amazing how people who are otherwise incredibly credentialed can mangle basic grammar--like the woman who sent an email saying, "I have ask the program director to look into this."
What really got me foaming at the mouth, though, was the email I received from someone at another college, requesting "some of your course syllabuses'." Argh, apostrophe abuse and incorrect Latin plural, all in one sentence!
Has anyone noticed a proliferation of "eK ceteras" going around. I'm not sure how that pronunciation came about but it drives me crazy. I work with people that have a bunch of letters after their names and they all do it. I've seriously thought about putting "ekc" in an email or something to see if they would notice.
Here is another pet peeve of mine,saying "impacted" when you mean "affected".Impacted doesn't mean "collided with" it means "occluded",like an impacted wisdom tooth.
