Your pet peeve misspellings?

I think confusing complementary for complimentary (and vice versa) is a very common one. :yes: Not so much a misspelling, as a confusion over definition.

Can't say it bothers me, though! :biggrin:
 
Just been checking various dictionaries (on and offline!) and most of them don't include noone, or cite it as a misspelling. But as it is so common over here (people seem to spell it 'noone' more often than they do 'no one'), I wonder when a misspelling officially becomes a variation? :shrugs:

After all, language is mutable.
 
Oh man! Somehow I missed this thread when it was originally posted, but I teach at a "career school" and my students' spelling is atrocious. Some of my personal "faves":

hisself or his self (meaning himself)
U (instead of spelling out "you")
"their" versus "there" versus "they're"
could of/should of instead of could have or should have
now in days (instead of nowadays)

I could go on for days with this. . .
 
Stuffs instead of stuff. Why do people write stuffs? I will never understand.

Seen instead of saw. This is big in New England. Many years ago, a guy who wanted to meet me left a note on my car windshield: "I seen you at the pool today.."
 
I have quite a few pet peeves:
-"Pretentious" misspelt as pretensious or pretencious. I've seen it quite a few times now and one of these times was in a newspaper.
-Receipt spelt as reciept, received as recieved - " I" before "E" except after "C"- I learnt this in first grade at school.
-Annoying spelt as anoying, borrowed as borowed, cancelled as canceled or even worse, as canselled
 
Not really about spelling, but funny.

how to write good

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?