It's because native speakers learn with their ears first. 'Wondering' instead of 'wandering' is a perfectly normal mistake for kids and younger teens (many fanfiction writers) to make. Think about it.

'Wonder.' It has 'on' in the middle, but it's really pronounced like 'one' (and 'won' of course, but that's not the point). 'Wander' has an 'an' in the middle, but it's pronounced like 'on' instead of 'anne' or whatever. When sounding out words, people normally start with the first letter and go for the next couple that work together. So, they get 'wonder' when 'wander' is meant. 'Have' and 'of' are also easy to misuse because most people shorten 'should have' and 'could have' to 'should've' and 'could've' when speaking, and it sounds an awful lot like 'should of' and 'could of,' so kids get confused.

All native English speakers deal with stupid spelling mistakes like that. When I was little, I'd forget the W on 'wrap,' write 'rap' and worry I actually wrote 'rape,' and I'd spell 'girl' like 'gril,' though I could tell it was wrong just by looking at it (but, come on, 'girl' sounds like it begins with 'gr,' sort of). 'Insure' and 'ensure' I didn't get straight until I was around thirteen (kept forgetting I could use 'en' as an alternate to 'in'), and 'affect' and 'effect' still sometimes trip me up because, fuck them, their meanings are similar.

Surely as you learned English you realized phonics is close to useless? Individual words are derived from many different languages, so there are many alternate ways to spell the same sounds (there, their, and they're) and then there are words that are spelled similarly but don't sound alike at all (bomb, comb, and tomb). English is a mess.

I'm not saying confusing 'have' with 'of' and 'wandering' with 'wondering' isn't annoying, because it is. But it's understandable.

 

alter/altar is the same - extremely noticeable for me (because I thought that these two are spelled differently, like it would happen in Polish), but easy to miss for native speaker.

Tolkien/Tolkein is probably a similar situation.

 

'Should've' with 'should of' does shit me though. Phonetics aside, take a nanosecond to look at it and you'll know it's nonsensical.

 

Affect/effect was likely mentioned before, but I had to. It bothers me more than it probably should after years of reading fanfiction.

 

My guess is that in another one hundred years, should of will be correct, since written language and grammar rules usually adjust to spoken language. It's the same reason that people is an acceptable plural of person, though the two words have nothing to do with each other.

 

Yes and no. It's been 500 years or so and we still don't pronounce the 't's in words like 'often' or 'soften.'

 

Hmm, I pronounce the T in "often", and most people around here seem to do it too, as I find it jarring to hear "offen".

I find it very annoying to read "gotten", especially in Harry Potter fics, as it seems to be a distinctly American word. I remember seeing it last and was pulled out of the immersion and just stared at the word. I don't know why it bothers me so much, but I think it's just the way it sounds. Just use "got".

 

I've only seen 'gotten' in certain situations.

He got himself killed.
He seems to have gotten himself killed.

I don't remember seeing 'gotten' when it wasn't preceded by 'have'. Is this really an American thing?

 

...don't we?

 

I don't on the latter.

 

I have a new pet peeve!
Well, not exactly new, more... Revisited. Essentially, I now hate any summary that is overly descriptive- basically telling you the entire plot. Hey, here's an idea: Why can't, just once, I actually be surprised by the pairing. I mean, find out what the final pairing is going to be, and actually think "Wow, that's surprising and interesting." But that doesn't happen because I already know it from the description.

That also segways nicely into my next point, that of severitus. I am a firm believer that even the most tired and boring plots can be done well with the right author (except MPreg).
Thus, I would love to see a fic where the realisation that Snape is Harry's father is not only a surprise, but done tastefully, and not at the very start. A fic where that realization changes the whole playing field- so that we, as the readers, were totally not expecting it. Instead, severitus ends up being the entire plot, instead of an interesting sub-plot.
I suppose that wasn't really a peeve, but I wanted to say it.


Also, MPreg.

 

Lol, total opposite for me.

When I read 'bad at summaries, plz read', or when there's grammatical errors in it or, more relevant to your peeve, when they tell me nothing at all.

There's a lot of garbage out there, I'll take minor spoilers if it means sifting through the undesirables me efficiently.

 

QFT. I don't know who invented this 'bad at summaries' shit, but s/he should be drawn, quartered, reanimated and thrown into a basilisk pit. If the author can't even bother to write an interesting 2-3 sentence summary, why the fuck should I even care about the story?

 

If there's any variation of the phrase "I suck at summaries" in the summary, I don't even bother checking out the fic. If the author sucks at writing what should be a short one-two sentence preview, imagine how much more they must suck at anything longer than that.

 

massacre/mascara

That's about the weirdest word substitution I've ever seen :facepalm

 

It falls under "my first fic - please be nice" and "no flames!"

Any combination of those sentences and I won't bother to click on the story.

---------- Post automerged at 02:18 ---------- Previous post was at 01:55 ----------

I remember reading a few older fics and coming across the idea of a family magic book. I like the idea and I think it makes sense that some magical families might create spells or potions and then decided to not share them with anyone else.

However it seems this has morphed into 'family magic', where a pureblood for some reason gets part or all of their magic from some strange mystical 'family magic' source that the head of the family can cut family members off from leaving them squibs or near powerless.
The whole concept bugs me to no end. It simply doesn't make any sense at all in the wider scope of canon.

 

I don't have a problem with family magic simply being closely guarded secret spells created by the family over time.

In fact I find it more unbelievable that this wouldn't be the case than that it would.

 

My biggest fear is that it'll all change: Rly, thsl b it. Gr8, rt?

And if it does, it'll be one of the first languages to ever shorten, rather than lengthen in it's written form.

 

See written Chinese before and after Mao. We're hardly unique.

Language changes all the time, particularly the one we're conversing in. 'Emty' turned into 'empty.' "Don't know" turned into 'dunno' in all but the most formal speeches. 'Aks' (from Chaucer's time) turned into 'ask,' which then turned back into 'aks' or 'ax' as a bludgeon to beat on black people in the U.S. (whose dialect, incidentally, uses the more logical 'hisself' and 'theirselves' vs. the less so 'himself' and 'themselves').

I guess I'm less uptight about language purity than I used to be, as I've come to realize that English is the sluttiest language out there. Borrowing from other languages (facilitated by English's rather simplistic grammar), semantic drift, pronunciation variations, and overall malleability and plasticity are the norm, not the exceptions.

 

I can't all remember them impromptu, so here are some: bad writing, bad spelling, Marry Sue, characters such as Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville or Luna going Khmer Rouge Magiques in five minutes and without any justification.