I agree. I’m going to start brooming the room. Thank you for this insight.

While “broom the floor” isn’t common, “sweep the floor” is. Of course, why we use the tool name as a verb in the case of “mop” or “vacuum”, but not in the case of “broom”, is another case of English being English. But, you shouldn’t expect consistency out of English. It’s not really a language, it’s several languages dressed up in a trench-coat pretending to be one.

It’s “mop”

Well what should I end them on?

If the murky depths of my memories of school is correct, the location of the period is dictated by whether or not it is part of the quote. So, if the quote should have a period at the end, it goes inside the quotation marks. If the quote does not include the period (e.g. you are quoting part of a sentence), but you are at the end of a sentence in your own prose, you put the period on the outside of the quotation marks.

Absolutely. Anyone who has done any programming should recognize that changing what’s in the quote is corrupting the data.

If I’m quoting a question though, then it makes sense to include the question mark in the quote.

I laughed when Joe asked "That's the hill you chose?".  

Isn’t that how it’s done in English (Traditional)?

Ugh, there should be one before AND after!

I have to, take issue with this, one. The rules of commas are, pretty, easy actually: Use a, comma where you’d, pause when speaking. If, you read it out, loud and sound like Captain, Kirk then you put, a comma in the, wrong spot.

I can’t read things comfortably with too many commas. My internal monologue stops at each if them.

This one I’m so guilty of, it just seems fine when used in moderation, even if I know it’s wrong.

I’ve always just used them where natural breaks would be if the sentence was spoken. I know how it’s supposed to be used and I’ll do it correctly when writing papers, but it hurts inside to see it that way. I don’t understand how it improves comprehension.

There’s places where a comma can cause psychic damage.

There are so many examples for this. Some that come to mind:

• “He has 30 years” instead of “He is 30 years old” (Spanish “Tiene 30 años”)
• “How do you call this?” instead of “What do you call this?” (e.g., French: Comment ça s’appelle? I think German too)
• “I’m going in the bus” instead of “I’m going on the bus”
• “She is more nice” instead of “She is nicer”

Apart from that, try explaining to a learner why “Read” (present) and “Read” (past) is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

Or plural (or do I capitalize that here? 🤔) inconsistencies: one “mouse,” two “mice”; but one “house,” two “houses.” To be fair, other languages do that stuff too.

I think if I took it too far and said that all contractions are basically acceptable, y’all’d’n’t’ve agreed with me.

I consider the arbitrary rules that we call formal English to just be the set of rules that lead to the most widely understood texts, so if you want to reach a broad audience, both across the world and across time, then keeping to those formal rules makes sense.

Isn’t formality itself a bunch of arbitrary rules? There’s rarely anything about any formality rule that makes the thing itself inherently more or less polite, the point is that choosing to follow those arbitrary rules communicates that you are (or aren’t) choosing to be formal about the thing. It’s like a giant tone marker for “respectfully”

Y’all’d’n’t’ve is one of my favorites

This is the one that still ends up in my technical writing.

Not only is it fine, but it’s the most common (and i would say most correct) way to write scientific papers.

The tone of scientific papers is usually supposed to focus on the science, not the scientist, so you have “reagent A was mixed with reagent B”, not “I mixed reagent A and reagent B”.

An added bonus is that it prevents having to assign credit to each and every step of a procedure, which would be distracting. E.G., “Alice added 200 ml water to the flask while Bob weighed out 5 g of sodium hydroxide and added it to the flask”.

Who says it’s not?
(/s)

Macht sinn to me.

A calque.

which is wrong

Which is also just prescriptive bullshit perpetuated by grammar nazis

https://www.sprachlog.de/2009/01/12/seit-wann-machen-wir-im-deutschen-sinn/

I think if something gets said a certain way for a period of over a hundred years, maybe it’s time to accept it as a normal way to say things

Dashes, of all kinds need to fucking die, die, die.
While not completely fair, my burning hatred of dashes comes for word processing applications automatically replacing hyphens and especially double hyphens in code with dashes. And this never gets caught until said code needs to be copy-pasted back into a functional application, and it fails. Sometimes in weird and horrible ways. So, while it’s the auto-replace which causes the problem, the existence of dashes is proximate enough that they all need to be burned out of existence for all time.

Em dashes are supposed to be padded with something like a half-space on either side. Some computer systems do proper kerning and will space them out automatically if you don’t manually add spaces, but most don’t do it. Like you, I would just add full spaces because em dashes practically touching the words is bullshit.

oh no

oh no I apparently feel very strongly that you’re wrong here

You’re right that m-dashes should be spaced, of course. But there’s a big difference between an m-dash and an n-dash, and you used the wrong one in your example. An m-dash, like a semi colon or colon, is for separating two related clauses — there’s never at time when you should use two in the same sentence. Whereas n-dashes are used for parantheticals –sub-clauses that can’t stand on their own– and should, like round brackets or quotation marks, have spaces on the outside but not the inside.

Do u rembr txt spk? It ws vry anyng 2 read n 2 rite.