A Word, Please: Internet lists can often lead you astray

If you search the Internet for the term “grammar mistakes,” you’ll get a lot of hits, many of them published lists that school you on the linguistic atrocities people supposedly commit every day.

Inc. magazine’s title was “10 Common Grammar Mistakes Even Smart People Make.”. BuzzFeed’s headline was “15 Common Grammatical Errors That Drive You Completely Insane.” “The 11 Most Common Grammatical Mistakes and How to Avoid Them” was BusinessInsider’s, while the Huffington Post put it in the form of a quiz: “Can You Catch These Common Grammar Mistakes?”

In my 12 years of writing about grammar, I’ve read more of these handy-dandy little lists than I can count. So I can tell you that, in all their hundreds of examples, there’s really only one lesson: Never, ever trust one of these lists. Most of them are pure rubbish, and even the best of them will lead you astray at least a little bit.

Individuals pontificating on their own blogs and websites can be forgiven, I suppose. But the lists published by real news sources and magazines bum me out. Journalists are supposed to source their information. And these lists reveal that the authors never bothered to check facts. For some reason, when it comes to grammar, everyone thinks that his or her own beliefs are publishable as fact, no checking required.

For example, among the crimes on the BuzzFeed list is the dreaded split infinitive, which the site explains as follows: “The infinitive form of a verb is the form it takes when it doesn’t apply to any specific subject — ‘to focus,’ for example. By placing the adverb ‘really’ in between the words ‘to’ and ‘focus,’ it splits the infinitive. Keep it together — the infinitive and yourself.”

Here’s what the BuzzFeed folks would have found if they bothered researching the dreaded split infinitive: “The term is actually a misnomer,” states Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, “as ‘to’ is only an appurtenance of the infinitive, which is the uninflected form of the verb.”

No one should ever write about grammar without having a good usage guide like Merriam’s handy. Alas, most authors of these lists don’t seem to know that usage guides exist. But surely they’ve heard of Strunk and White, right? So why not check “The Elements of Style”?

“Some infinitives seem to improve on being split, just as a stick of round stove wood does,” the longtime best seller advises, proffering this example: “I cannot bring myself to really like the fellow.”

The Inc. magazine list, the one about “mistakes even smart people make,” kicks off with a lesson on the word “irregardless,” saying in no uncertain terms that it’s not a word.

Really? Smart people use “irregardless”? I’ve never heard a smart person use that word and only rarely have I heard dumb people use it.

But the real problem with this assertion is the sourcing. There isn’t an eighth-grader alive who doesn’t know where to check if you want to know whether something really is a word. So why didn’t the author just open a dictionary? If she had, she’d have seen that “irregardless” is, without a doubt and indisputably, a word. Sure, it’s an awful word — a fact many dictionaries discuss. But it is a word.

If I had to say one nice thing about these lists, it’s this: They always get “its” and “it’s” right. The one without the apostrophe, they’ll tell you, is the possessive, as in “The dog wagged its tail.” The one with an apostrophe is exclusively a contraction of “it is” or “it has”: It’s raining.

But if you don’t know which items on the list are right and which are wrong, does the list have any value at all?

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].