My Top Three Grammar Pet Peeves

Apologies for another boring and nerdy post, but I have three things I want to make very clear.

1. Premiere vs. Premier. An event where they show or do something for the first time is not a “premier.” Premier actually refers to the rank of something, so while the best video showing ever could be the premier premiere, and average one is just a premiere. Get it straight if you’re going to be writing about snowboarding in particular during the Fall, ok?

2. They vs. It. Most companies have lots of people working for them. So yes, it can be tempting to call one company in particular “they.” However, there is one ONE of that company, so when you want to refer to it in a sentence, the company is an it. However, if you want to talk about the people working at the company, and are referring to “the staff of brand X” that is a they. Gosh.

3. Compound modifiers. So you love to use lots of adjectives in your writing — really spices things up. Then you better learn to use damn dashes right to make all those extra adjectives into compound modifiers. Think of it this way: If the colorful and exciting words just put in front of that noun together are all required to get across exactly what you mean, then they need a dash connecting them. Let me find a good Nick Lipton sentence to demonstrate.

Here is how it looked when I first visited the post:

Allow me to demonstrate a proper insult you ignorant, hairy palmed, has enough time to Write In a response because he can’t get his dick wet, anonymous comment board pussy, still afraid of the fun box bitch. Oh wait, I just did.

And here is what it should look like:

Allow me to demonstrate a proper insult you ignorant, hairy-palmed, has-enough-time-to-Write-In-a-response-because-he-can’t-get-his-dick-wet, anonymous-comment-board pussy, still-afraid of-the-fun-box bitch. Oh wait, I just did.

There was no way to make that sentence ACTUALLY grammatically correct, but at least it’s slightly more coherent like that. Now please figure out how to put together sentences. Typos happen (a lot) but at least try to pretend to know how it’s supposed to work. The Internet will thank you.