Not Worth its Salt, Sugar

I made sure with my wife, "You don't want no salt and no sugar, right?"  Wrong, right?  Well, not verbalized wrong, but written misleadingly for sure.  As Ricky Ricardo (I Love Lucy Ricardo's husband, for you younger folks) would plead, "Let me splain."  My wife wanted her favorite bread and butter pickles--Kroger brand only, by the way.  I was double-checking with her that I shouldn't buy a no-salt or no-sugar variety.  Hence, I should have written, "You don't want no-salt or no-sugar, right?"  But then we wouldn't have enjoyed the whimsy.

Count your Blessings

"There's many things I can be thankful for, but distinguishing singular versus plural doesn't happen to be one of them."  Please say, "There are many things . . .."  This grammar point is brought up because it is mishandled by folks in so many different circles, from sports announcers to home-shopping pitchmen, etc.

Shut Up

How can you make fewer grammatical errors?  Shut up!  That is, stop talking before you err.  "Where is he?", not, "Where is he at?"  "How long will you be here?", not, "How long will you be here for?"  If we had said in school, "I don't know where he's at," the teacher might have slapped us with a ruler!  The main problem is not that there's a preposition at the end of the sentence, but that there's a totally unnecessary word.