Peeves! Get'cher Peeves Here!

[gnomi]

As a follow-up to yesterday's discussion, I began to wonder what folks' grammar error pet peeves are. Here are some of mine:

-- Its/it's

-- Fewer/less

-- That/which

-- Their/they're/there

-- Your/you're

I'd love to hear other folks', if you all (or y'all) are in a mood to share.

Comments

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

I've started using this one myself, especially when I'm already using "sex" in the same sentence to mean "doing it". Using a word in two different senses in the same sentence: Bad Idea.
That's one busy sentence! (Heh.) This is a peeve I know I'm on the losing side of for the simple reason that your typical middle-America soccer mom can't bring herself to use the word sex in conversation, preferring to employ gender as its genteel synonym, and the editors of her newspapers cater to that choice. Yet, still a peeve. There are useful distinctions these words can still make, particularly in discussions of gender identity; I hate to lose those distinctions without a good reason.

Re they paired with a singular antecedent: This is correct English, and has been for centuries.
This puzzles me a bit; that's not accurate of any style guide I've used. Are you by any chance British? Garner indicates that "the indeterminate they" is more commonly accepted and even "more or less standard" in British English. (I do disagree with Garner on a few points, but I generally find his judgment sensible.) He discusses the matter from several different angles in his entries on concord, sexism and pronouns. The subject also inspired a usage note in American Heritage ... oh, wow, looks like there's a POV/NPOV/accuracy war about it over at Wikipedia, too. Bleah. I'll stick with the traditionalists on this one. (After years of letting just anyone create user documentation without guidelines, my company has finally decided to avoid this question entirely by converting everything into the imperative and the second person.)