r/GrammarPolice

Hi, I made this one. I've played Wordle-likes for years and always wanted to build my own, but I never had an idea that felt like mine.

The push came from a strange place. Half of what I read these days is written by AI, and it's never short. Every email, every doc, twelve words where five would do. At some point I said the phrase out loud, long story short, and realised it was a game.

So: you get a twelve-word sentence. You rephrase it in exactly five of its own words. Real English, same meaning, your job is to work out which words carry the sentence and which are just dressed up to look important. Scoring is Wordle style, blue for right word in the right spot, orange for in the answer but elsewhere, grey for out. Five tries, one sentence a day.

My wife and my brother were the playtesters. An early version let "the" beat proper words in the answer, which felt awful to lose to, so the answers now always favour the concrete word. That one change ate a whole weekend.

Why do people incessantly use "there's" in conjunction with pluralized nouns?

It is "there are" (I refuse to use the contraction) the moment a noun becomes plural.

It hurts my brain seeing there's (and saying in my head "there is") and having to reread the sentence several times because of the spelling error.

There's rumors this might not go over well in this sub.

Hey I was practicing grammar using Wren and Martin recently and it says that "EFFECTS" is a noun in "THE AFTER EFFECTS OF THE DRUG ARE BAD".

I checked with gpt and it also shows the same and i didn't understand its explanation. It says that "here, effects is the head noun of the noun phrase 'the after-effects of the drug.'

Can anyone explain

I'll have a paragraph finished and then spend forever on one sentence.

Move a word.

Change the tense.

Remove a comma.

Put the comma back.

Eventually I don't even know what sounds right anymore.

Does anyone else feel this way?

When did that become a thing? Or do people just type out each word as their thoughts produce them?

I'll go first - when someone says "mute" instead of "moot". Or they STILL don't know the difference between there, their and they're!

"Do you mind?" is the ultimate linguistic trap because it’s the only question in the English language where "Yes" and "No" have flipped meanings depending on whether someone answers the literal grammar or the implied intent. Grammatically, asking "Do you mind?" means "Does this bother you?", so responding with "Yes" literally translates to "Yes, I am annoyed, stop doing that." Yet in reality, people constantly say "Yes!" with a smile while pulling out a chair for you or handing you the salt, treating it like you asked "Is it okay if I do this?" You end up stuck in a weird micro-second buffer zone, trying to decipher whether you just received enthusiastic permission or a polite warning, making what should be a simple interaction feel like a total brain glitch.

or maybe its just me :)

edit

LMAO I DIDNT EXPECT THESE MANY COMMENTS ON MY POST!! THANKS FOR COMMENTING ALSO IM NOT TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY OBVIOUSLY IT WAS JUST A LITTLE THING THAT BOTHERED ME SO I DECIDED TO POST!!

The word gotten is loathsome to see and loathsome to hear. It has no place in proper English. Discuss.

This has popped up occasionally but now seems to have become mainstream

I seen this. I seen him/her/it That's what I seen